#i should revisit this project again. i should also reread this book

[tickfleato]

hi i forgor to post art. adam be upon ye

#i should revisit this project again. i should also reread this book #frankenstein #frankenstein's creature #frankenstein's monster #my art #fanart

[goose-books]

please check out @yvesdot's remastered debut! trust me, it's worth a read and a reread and a re-revisit. for the blog tour, i give you... another blast from the past, an old-fashioned writeblr-style comic sans powerpoint!

Something’s Not Right, published by tRaum Books, will be released October 10th 2023 and is available to preorder at Amazon, Bookshop.org, and itch.io. It will also be available upon release signed from Bookshop Santa Cruz. yves. will also have a local event at 6:30 PM on October 12th at the Santa Cruz Diversity Center and another on January 4th 2024 (to be announced) at Bookshop Santa Cruz.

(my sixth favorite story is koschei, btw. shoutout to koschei. sorry i left you off the slides)

(slides described under the cut)

all slides are written in white comic sans on a black background.

slide one: text reading "FIVE reasons YOU should read" over a cropped image of the cover for Something's Not Right, featuring the title. smaller comic sans next to the image reads "by yves."

slide two: at the center of the slide, text reads "1. IT'S GAY!" smaller text boxes, scattered around the slide, read:

so many transgender people

you want fluff? we got fluff. you want angst? we got angst. you want high octane drama? we got it

you like metaphors for queerness? we’ve got metaphors for queerness

some characters’ identities are plot relevant! some of them just happen to be trans!

there’s even an m/f couple i actually like!

there’s literally a lesbian robot what else am i supposed to say

first book where i ever saw a they/them lesbian referred to as a woman and they at the same time <3 <3 <3

you want monsterfucking? we got—

between the first and third boxes is this image of feathers. beneath the monsterfucking box is this image of a halo/eclipse. beneath the they/them lesbian box is the anakin image from this post, reading, "dyke business. go back to your drinks"

slide three: the top of the slide reads "2. CLEVER USE OF TROPES AND TALES." the bullet points beneath read:

the author was a lit major & lovingly: it shows

fresh takes on everything from sexy vampires to demigod/human romance

do you like russian folklore? do you wish it was set in your high school

hansel and gretel story followed immediately by wlw fairies

STORY WHERE VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN GOES TO A PARENT TEACHER CONFERENCE

an arrow points from the sexy vampire bullet to an image of edward cullen, captioned "this guy isn't in there." another points from the frankenstein bullet to a picture of the book Frankenstein, captioned "this guy is, tho"

slide four: at the center of the slide, text reads "3. DELIGHTFUL NARRATIVE VOICE." smaller text boxes read "the sheer range of the range of character narrations in this book is impressive and so fun" and "we got teen talk we got litfic prose we got monsters narrating we got ordinary people." there are also three quotes from various stories, set in speech bubbles:

“Everyone’s cousin Tanya says she’s done it with an elf dude. That doesn’t mean shit.”

“And all of these things were true, and simultaneous, and all of them were occurring only a moment before she might be killed, and rise again.”

“At first, the plants seemed quite innocuous, and Ephraim watched them pile up on the windows of the little greenhouse with mild curiosity.”

there is also an edited image of the "she doesn't have the range" meme, reading, "they have the range."

slide five: the top of the slide reads "4. DON’T LIKE ONE-OFFS? NO PROBLEM!" the bullet points beneath read:

do you prefer your short stories unrelated to each other? completely tonally variant?

SNR has got that!

do you prefer your short stories interconnected? do you like recurring characters? do you want to see… characters from OTHER yves. projects?

SNR has got that too!

smaller text boxes read "Red and Eliza from Forest Castles are there!" and "maybe avner too. i'm not allowed to say"

there is also a picture of hannah montana's "best of both worlds" album.

slide six: the top of the slide reads "5. THERE ARE NEW STORIES IN IT!" the bullet points beneath read:

already an SNR fan? already have a copy? you haven’t yet read the new content!

THREE new stories

what if the alien abductee you were interviewing had questions… for you?

what if you had to love-potion your crush… for someone else?

what if you had to come out to your date… AS A MONSTER?

there are clipart images on the side of an alien spaceship, a bubbling potion, and a lit candle.

slide seven: word art with a glowing green shadow reads "max's favorite stories :)". each story blurb goes with a corresponding image:

Six Hours Under: the woman on the L train is crying, dead, and very very pretty. [clipart of a train]

Monsters and The Guy: there’s a guy in Arrivals. he’s being weird about it. [clipart of an airport]

The Hands and The Mouth: the story-speakers speak only in script. there are only a few of them left. [clipart of rolling waves]

Don't Feel Guilty: a teen’s plant collection starts to unnerve their father. [clipart of a leaf]

Blood Orange Tea: getting trapped at work with your crush is awkward even when you’re not a vampire. [clipart of iced tea]

slide eight: large text reads "THANK YOU. GO FORTH AND BUY SNR." in smaller text is the information paragraph from this post.

#max.txt #snr #something's not right #writers on tumblr #yvesdot #yves tag #by others #:) :) :)

[cor-ardens-archive]

I can’t remember if we’ve talked about this before, but have you read the idiot? this conversation about ptsd vs bpd is making me wonder what your thoughts on nastasya filipovna are... shes such a fascinating character to me, I would love to know how you feel about her

I don't think we have, but she's one of my favorite Dostoevsky characters, which is probably predictable — and a little frustrating to me, as I would've preferred her to be more of a subject in her own right than she actually was. But I understand that's not the story the book set out to tell, it's simply where my personal interests lie.

I'm very drawn to characters who are soaked in shame and believe the worst of themselves. I read The Idiot some time ago, so the details are hazy, but I remember how she revolted at Myshkin's compassion and belief in her purity. It's not just shame either, I think there was also a layer of pride and self-respect in her repulsion. She thinks she can ruin Myshkin and others because she is tainted, but I believe she also understands that his compassion is somewhat cheap, because he refuses to see her in all her complexity. The insistence that she is innocent is not incorrect, she isn't to blame for what was done to her, but her sense of personal responsibility and wretchedness is continually invalidated by how he speaks of her experiences. I don't know if what I'm saying is accurate because, like I said, I read this book some good years ago, and I don't know how much I projected onto her character at the time, but to me she seemed to be in a space where many victims find themselves — afraid of corrupting good people, and also feeling misunderstood by them, because they refuse to see the parts of herself that are not innocent and pure, or don't feel that way, the parts of herself that want to acknowledge feelings and thoughts that are not altogether "pure"; and then feeling that the only people who can see, understand and even accept the uglier parts of you are the very people who would hurt you. It's complex — of course she was a victim, but the compassion Myshkin could afford so often seemed condescending to me. I think the book is inclined that way as well, as Myshkin fails to fit the role of the hero who would save the fallen heroine. There's a lot of interesting stuff there about Christian notions of salvation, and I think I should revisit the book because I would be able to think more deeply about it now. (And, again, I might be saying a lot of inaccurate things, my memory of it isn't great.)

But yeah, Nastasya was a fascinating character, and I remember especially the sense that her life was dictated so entirely by her past, by her memories, and whether she would be able to move on from that. It's interesting to me because I don't think one can or should "transcend" their past, which is what Myshkin seemed to think would save her.

And I guess I'm ranting about something not entirely related to your ask, because I guess you wanted to know any thoughts I might have on her erratic and self-destructive behavior. She's clearly dealing with trauma (and presents a lot of symptoms that were then taken as "hysteria"), and what got to me is how absolutely misunderstood she was, how completely alone. All these different characters had different perspectives of her, and none of them seemed able to truly get to know her, or even attempt to understand her experiences and the pain she was in. Even Myshkin, what did he offer but platitudes?

Anyway, sorry if this isn't a very satisfactory answer, I'm trying to remember my impressions from like almost a decade ago, and they might all be dumb. I should definitely reread it, it was one of my favorites of Dostoevsky despite my frustration at some of its choices.

#asks

[1d1195]

A PENNY?!?! Sam literally how?! AND FOR JEANS?! but you know what I would try to achieve that high again too lol But yay for shopping! Hope you got some lovely stuff bestie!

Dealing with teens all day for the entire work week is CRAZY so I dont blame you for having constant headaches lol oddly enough my brother is the one that suffers from headaches lol Oh hormones for sure cause the stomach to be wack which is so unfair! this period will NOT affect you on your break!! A period is never fun but hope youre taking care of yourself!

ME TOO!!! I do not fit in those flared/bell bottom jeans thats trendy now which is tragic solely because that's all i ever see in stores!?! Im also not even close to being considered tall or petite and those just make me look so off too bahah So skinny jeans for me have always been the option where although not the best option, they are the lesser evil of jeans lol

AWW that's so cute! Little Sam was such an icon for that!(you still are obvi) You should for sure should revisit the marry janes for the fall!!! I am waiting for that day too! Sam I don't think you know how much of a HATER i am of electric scooters, i am fighting a battle everyday trying not to get killed by them on campus 😭 But I love that coleege was walkable for you! It must have been nice getting to know the area well!

I had a feeling you played softball at least! Idk if my mind was just projecting the Made to be Universe/storyline but softball seemed like something you would have done/enjoyed! But omg you were like a full on athlete?! That's so cool! Not the injuries of course but the rest is!

I tense up so quickly because im very awkward about my feelings😭SAM THERE HAD TO BE MANY THAT FOUND YOU HOT! i kid you not being smart is SO attractive! Plus a cute girly who is GOOD at math in a typically guy dominated field!? The puns seem like a very you thing and i love that honestly! I think its so cute when people do that!

ALSO THAT POLL😭 bestie I cant choose😭I need them ALL! I spent a good minute thinking about my vote lol very excited though!

Have such a lovely start to your break Sam! love you!-💜

If there is a coupon I will find it lol. I can't tell you how many times I've signed up for American Eagle text messages and then unsubscribed just to get 15% off every time. I think I had a crazy reward and then the jeans were already on sale. I'm pretty sure they have to charge you something in order for the sale to go through so I think they HAD to charge me something.

I'm already enjoying my break actually despite my period. Thank God for Midol tbh I think I would die without it. My body is very clockwork so after cramps for a FUN 24 hours it's usually much more manageable. I HAVE to take meds though even if I don't feel crampy right away. The second my body realizes I'm on my period it's like "TIME FOR CRAMPS" and again, if I don't take the meds right away I get behind the pain and I am FUCKED for the remainder of the 24 hours.

I am trying to relax as much as possible because May and June are going to be crazy with senior prom/graduation and stuff. Plus I've outsourced myself as well for lots of other projects 🙃 I really need to learn to say no (time to reread Dolcezza) But I plan on finishing this book I'm reading (I haven't done very well reading lately, but I'm telling myself it's okay because it's not a race and I read a lot early on.) I do have to do some lesson planning but I actually enjoy that because I find math soothing like a psychopath hahahahaha

That's amazing you like skinny jeans. I feel so ostracized sometimes when it comes to my jeans choices. All my friends and coworkers have moved on with the trends and I'm still in 2013/2014/2015/2016 hahaha. VERY controversial: I actually really like jeans. I always by jegging jeans so they're super stretchy and comfy. Obviously if I can wear leggings I will hahahaha.

I'm crying about the electric scooter. You must be on a sizable campus to have electric scooters that's so funny. People drove their bikes/skateboards around campus a lot but no scooters. I loved the area my college was in (I actually live down the street from it in an apartment now because I love this area so much) it's very much the setting behind My Friend's Toyota hahaha

LOOK AT YOU MISS DETECTIVE HAHAHAHAHA I didn't even realize that about Made to Be that's so funny and true. I tried a bit of everything tbh. I did swimming (mostly so I wouldn't die growing up on the beach) and tennis lessons which I wasn't good at either but I really enjoyed anyway. I suck at ice skating (do you know how often you use your ankles for pretty much every sport? 🙃) and idk what it is about basketball but I may as well just sit in the middle of the court it would be less harmful to those around me.

OH BESTIE SAME HERE ABOUT FEELINGS. Everyone around me told me my bf liked me before we started dating and I was like "No he doesn't he thinks I'm gross" ☠ if they found me hot and attractive I kinda wish they told me! 😭 it's selfish but it would have done a nice boost to my ego. I was never the 'looked' at friend if you will. I called myself The DUFF™ all throughout middle and high school I really did a number on my self-esteem 😭 I am probably a little toxic when it comes to being a STEM girly lol because I tried so hard in high school and college to prove I was just as smart as the boys (sometimes more actually 😉)

For the poll it's just about the order which I think is kind of fun! I hope other people are enjoying it--I find it really helpful! I thought I did a lot of my more "obscure" stories on the last round of voting so I thought it would be nice to bring back some of the more popular series. I almost threw Protection on there too but thought it was too much (and too mean to make that decision) hahahaha

💕💕

xoxo

#💜

[magratpudifoot]

Finished 22 January 2024:

A Crown So Cursed - L.L. McKinney

There's a lesson here, should I ever get myself together and actually write a series.

I decided not to reread the first two books before jumping back into this one. I found them to be fine. They were interesting enough that I wanted to finish the story, but it wasn't something I was compelled to revisit. I wanted so much for this series to be for me, it looked like it would be perfect for me, and it just wasn't, and that's fine.

But this book took a while to be released (I AM NOT COMPLAINING, that's just how things are! You will never catch me shaming someone for taking their time with a project!), so I didn't remember all of the details of what came before. And I was fine with that.

This book does not waste any time helping you along if you don't remember the lore. In one notable instance, a character returns from a previous book without any specific information to indicate when or where Alice first met them. I still don't know what they did together previously. Again, I read the first two books three long pandemic years ago, and I accept responsibility for deliberately chosing not to do a pre-read re-read, but I am left at the end of it all blindly trusting that we didn't all just get Dawn Summersed because I still have no prior memory of this character.

I'm not asking for a Previously On. I don't want that 4th chapter in every Babysitter's Club book where the action stops for the copy paste of everyone's bio. And this series is very clearly written by a fandom writer for fandom readers, people who can be expected to have encyclopedic knowledge of their media. I get it. I am a fandom participant! I am obsessive about my favorite stories too! So it is fine if casual readers aren't included in the intended audience. None of this is judgement, just something to keep in mind when thinking about different people that might encounter a series and different uses they may have for a text.

This was also the most quadrillogy-feeling trilogy I have ever read. 25 pages from the end was the first time it even occurred to me this could possibly be the finale but brushed it off because there was so much character stuff left untended. 10 pages from the end, I was thinking, "I might just get the last book from the library instead of preordering this time." It wasn't until the acknowledgement that I was sure it was actually the end.

There's...a lot to explore in a follow up series, I guess?

#ms p reads 2024 #no one asked you ms p #I wanted to like this so much #and it's not even my biggest diasppointment so far this year! #it's fun! #it's got a couple of really cool moments #i am still just as intrigued by what is going on with that one character as i was at the beginning of the book! #I'm legitimately curious if those two weird moments where someone refers to the group as having 1 fewer character than it actually does #were ~*significant*~ or artefacts of significant rewrites #give the series a shot if it sounds enjoyable! #it will probably work bettwr if you go in with all three in hand and knowing that there are only three!

[bloodgulchblog]

Good news I finished The Cole Protocol in two (2) days because the knowledge it’s taken me almost half a year to get only a third of the way through the Halo canon motivated me.

Bad news, now I have to decide what to read next and it’s probably going to be the first short story anthology because making choices is hard.

Analysis of uncompleted halo novels in a roughly chronological order:

Evolutions Anthology Pros:

Immediately next if going by year of publication, so I don’t have to think about it

I don’t think I read every short story in the anthology back when I first got it, so there’s some new ground in there

Nylund wrote one of the stories

Stories are short

Cons:

Lot of pages

Random mixed bag of things

I recall being mad about some of them?

Forerunner Trilogy Pros:

Known quantity, I read these in the Forgotten Times

Bonkers in a good way

Delicious Forerunner lores

Cons:

Not related to anything I'm working on currently

I recall the middle book is kind of a slog

Kilo 5 Trilogy Pros:

For better or worse I liked a lot of Glasslands when I read it in the Forgotten Times

Jul ‘Mdama and Sangheili lores

I always did want to know what happened re: Naomi

Getting the Nylund squad out of the Forerunner shield world

Cons:

Karen Traviss

Karen Traviss writing the Nylund squad

Karen Traviss writing Dr. Halsey in particular

Serin Osman, Karen Traviss’s very special OC

Did I mention Karen Traviss?

I usually find insurrectionist-heavy plots boring, and I think the latter two are big into that. (And it sounds like ripe territory for more Karen Traviss Karen Travissing.)

Alpha 9 Duology

Pros:

New territory

The second one talks about what’s up with Fireteam Osiris after Halo 5 I think, which is relevant to a vague idea for a future project

Cons:

I don’t really care either way about Buck

I also don’t really care about the summaries of the plots I’ve seen

Remaining 2 Ferrets Books

Pros:

New territory

Relatively recent canon that will probably tell me more about what Blue Team has been up to and I care about them

I care about the Gammas

Cons:

My nemesis, Troy Denning

Books bullying me for not bothering with Halo Wars 2

My nemesis, Troy Denning (again)

Veta Lopis, Troy Denning’s very special OC

The monkey’s paw of me getting characters I care about but Troy Denning is writing them

Saint’s Testimony and Shadow of Intent, the Novellas

Pros:

Novellas are short

Staten wrote Shadow of Intent and I think I read and liked that.

Saint’s Testimony sounds like it’s rich in AI lore.

Cons:

Novellas are short.

Saint’s Testimony ties into a comic I haven’t read and I have been studiously avoiding the can of worms that is what I will do to myself if I start reading the comics too. (I’ll get to those eventually....)

Hunters in the Dark

Pros:

I already know I thought this one was okay

Swords of Sanghelios!

Zeta Halo lore!

Olympia Vale and Usze ‘Taham should kiss with tongue.

My Boy N’tho ‘Sraom

One book is a brief commitment as opposed to a big chunk of books

Cons:

Not new territory, I could be putting the time somewhere else

Merely okay

Fractures Anthology

Not even considering this one until I get caught up to a place later in the canon

There’s an incredibly bad Denning story in here

Rion Forge Books

Pros:

New territory

Ties into Forerunner Lores

SPARK?????

I want to see if I like Kelly Gay’s writing

Cons:

I want to reread the Forerunner Trilogy first.

I’d feel compelled to revisit Halo Wars first.

Legacy of Onyx

Pros:

I’ve heard this one is charming and fun, it is about Halo Youths.

The Youths are friends across species lines

Onyx????

Cons:

Standalone, disconnected from anything else I’m currently interested in.

Silent Storm & Oblivion

Pros:

Son John!

Cons:

Troy Denning....

#halo novels #halo novel opinions #the au in which I'm don quixote and troy denning is the windmill

[ettawritesnstudies]

How I outline!

Helllloooooo it’s been ages since I promised to do this and I’m SO sorry it’s so late but I finally got around to actually writing this post today so here it is :P @abalonetea​ and @inkwell-attitude, I think you both wanted to see this! (sorry to everyone else about the long post incoming!) DISCLAIMER: This is just my process, I’m not claiming it’s the best or that everyone should do this or that it works for every project. I don’t do this for short or simple stories, only for novel-length WIPs with complicated facets, but the process *can* be distilled for something less complex. 

Step 1: Brain Dumping

At this point, I probably have some semblance of a premise and characters for this idea, and possibly also an endgame idea of where I want to take the story but not middle or clue of how to get from point A to point B. This is where you collect ALL the thoughts. Usually, I do this between phone notes and a document on my laptop for brainstorming, but you can use voice memos or whatever else works. I’ve drawn ideas on my hand in pen during a lifeguarding shift before and just taken pictures of my inked-over arm before I have to jump into the pool again. It happens. In any case, you have ideas.

Step 2: Put it in some semblance of order by using a map

[Image ID] a blurry picture of a whiteboard covered in ideas in various covered pens looking something like a conspiracy theory board. This is the outline I was working on last night for the first book in the Laoche chronicles but it’s so vague at this point that I don’t think spoilers really matter. [end image ID]

The next objective is to put the random ideas in a linear order. I collect all the thoughts into one spot and dump them on the board. I color code, so first I write down all the set plot-points in the approximate order in the black pen, start to finish, and leave space above and below for stuff has to happen in the middle. 

Then the characters come in. I generally know backstories so those get dumped around the starting point in green. I figure out what characters are driving the plot and draw arrows between said plot points writing what the character does in the green pen. I include motivations, feelings, alliances, anything that might possibly be important to the plot too.

Then come logistics and filling in - that’s in red. You could also use conspiracy theory string. Where are they in the world? What needs to happen next? Where do I have plot holes? What makes the characters tick? What makes sense to happen next? What needs to happen to get to the end? What worldbuilding needs to get figured out to enable this plot point? Write it ALL down on a separate piece of paper and start brainstorming again. When you’ve got a good connection, add it. You’ll start to notice the board is starting to fill up. It won’t be linear anymore. That’s fine. 

Step 3: Flesh it out

[image ID] a poorly lit photo of a board covered in sticky notes of different, some overlapping each other. This is only a corner of the board because it’s the outline for Storge and I only took a picture of the first few chapters [end ID]

This is where it starts getting real. I take everything I have on the whiteboard (which at this point is a disaster) and transfer every plot point, character interaction, motivation, worldbuilding thing, pacing notes, anything about unreliable characters, author notes about who knows what at certain points (both the characters and the reader), plot twists, and anything else from the notes that didn’t make it to the whiteboard and reconstruct the story on a board.

The reason I use sticky notes is because you can move them around, layer them, and space them to create a cohesive narrative. If I need to play with timing, I can do that easily. If I need to connect plot points to characterizations or anything else, I can do that with layering and spacing next to each other. I’m still color coding at this point. I can start slapping on stuff like “which day does this happen on? What kind of transitions do I need?”, chapter divisions, and thematic elements. You’ll notice there are more holes. Fill those in sooner rather than later.

Step 4: Outline Time

I obviously can’t take my carefully made board with me to school so now it’s time to put it into a document. At this point I should preface this with the fact that I really like the 3 act structure, so I start my outline with that before anything else, like so, using headings to make a document outline - that way I can jump around the outline using the outline quickly. Probably a bit extra but it saves a ton of time

[image ID] a Microsoft word document outline with a hierarchical structure that shows acts, plot points, chapters, and chapter titles. [end ID]

Once that’s been filled out, I start putting the information from the board into the outline structure, and I make sure to cover EVERYTHING something like this: (with color-coding)

Chapter #/Title

Day of the narrative: this helps me keep time and iron out the pacing

The objective of the chapter: what does the reader need to learn, what is the one big thing that happens plot-wise

Main Plot Happenings - this goes in red text and details what actually happens in the chapter. For Storge, this is the plotline that follows Luca and the Laine family (when they’re together)

If there are subplots, these go here too in other colors. Orange for villainous cutaways. Purple for anything with the avian city/war subplot

Character arcs: these are green. I bullet point a list and name every major character in this chapter. anything important to their arcs goes here, as well as how I’m writing them. What are the emotions involved? This is normally the longest part because I have a lot of characters

Worldbuilding: What does the reader need to learn about the world from this chapter? This helps me space out the exposition. Details come up on a “need to know” basis, so there’s new worldbuilding in every chapter but no page-long dumps anywhere.

Themes: WHY is this chapter important? How is it contributing to what I want to say with this story?

Any other author notes about unreliable narrators, plot twists, foreshadowing, and what the reader should know at this point in the story. The goal is that you don’t anticipate the twist, but rereading it there’s a “HOW DID I NOT SEE THAT BEFORE” reaction, so this is more for my sake as a storytelling-craft thing.

Any excerpts or dialogue or description that I pre-wrote in the brain-dump phase and liked and think would fit well in this chapter.

Repeat with every chapter until you’re done.

This takes a long time, and I’m always revisiting and reworking that final outline once I’ve finished it but it’s such a huge help to set me on the right path without detouring 565479851321 times because I realized there was a plot hole too late. It’s overly complicated and incredibly intense and in-depth so It’s not for everyone but I like my 30-page long outlines, so here I am :P

If you’re still reading this, then wow good job, and thank you! I hope this was somewhat informative and not too tedious to scroll through! 

#long post #outlining #writing #writeblr #writeblr community #etta rambles #storgewip #the laoche chronicles #wow that got long #I tried to keep it brief #but my read more still isn't working on moble #which is stupid #so here I am #lol #hope you liked this!

[ravenclaw-headcanons]

moving forward and propositions

tldr; although this blog has been p much abandoned I still think we could have some fun here with a bit of reformatting and fresh ideas. any thoughts on things you’ve enjoyed from this blog or things you’d like to see in the future? or do you think there’s nothing wrong with the format and I should just go back to posting headcanons like normal?

hey

long time no see.

it's been, what 18 months since I was properly active on this blog? actually I just checked and the last headcanon was posted in Jan 2019. mad

when I sent out the word that I wouldn't be keeping up with this blog anymore I cited graduating and starting a full time job as the primary causes. essentially that I just didn't have the time to dedicate to this blog anymore. which was and still is true tbf

but I also (semi) abandoned this blog for the less admirable fact that my heart just wasn't in it. I guess you could probably tell that considering the headcanons kept getting scarcer and scarcer. I guess it's just, I've always loved having this community y'know. we've had great discussions on here and held events and forged friendships and that was really cool to have

but in terms of what this blog actually is

I don't know. I mean I can't say I have my finger on the pulse of fandom culture the way I did back in 2015, but when I started this blog it really felt like we'd found this untapped thing that people could be passionate about and engage with in a new way

I'm not going to sit here and pretend I'm some sort of innovator. in fact I stole the premise of this blog from mugglebornheadcanon. but there was still something new and exciting about it

I had loads of ideas and people had tons of their own headcanons they wanted to share and idk I guess it was just nice to have a creative space for people who were all passionate about the same thing

whereas now we're 1000 headcanons deep, I have nothing left to give, and there are tons of other blogs out there who can do this way better than I can. I'm not saying that in a self pitying way. it's just to have a blog like this that feeds off ideas and creativity you kind of need some passion, or at least inspiration

anyway this is all a very convoluted way of asking for a community brainstorm

because I still think this blog is great, and has the capacity to be the community driven creativity vortex that it was, I just don't think this is the way to go

hey, maybe you'll all reply and say 'no we've still got hundreds of headcanon ideas please let us post them!!' but my intuition is saying it might be time to move onto other content? it just feels a bit like the well has run dry on this kind of content, but wouldn’t it be awesome if we could find something new that relit that old spark?

so I guess this is a general call for ideas? a heads up to the muse of inspiration that now might be a good time to strike

if anyone has any thoughts or ideas on a way we could direct this blog to actually being, well something then please drop me a message!!

general musings so far on my part are that by far my favourite parts of running this blog were the various community events. ravenclaw pride day, the advent calendar, secret santa, harry potter playlists, and primarily the rereads we did

if you missed them, on this blog we hosted rereads for the 20th anniversaries of PS, CoS, and PoA where everyone would read one or two chapters a day. people would post their thoughts on the chapters, artwork, their progress on reading in another language, jokes, I posted discussion questions every day, it was pretty much a free for all

I don't know, maybe there's not a way of turning that into its own project. I mean theoretically I could set up a blog dedicated to hosting those kind of events. obviously having breaks in the middle, but it could be kind of fun. percy jackson would be a great one to do, or maybe the hunger games, narnia, asoue, his dark materials, twilight, spiderwick, inkheart etc

idk the issue is theoretically it could be great fun. we could have community votes on what people would like to reread, we could reread books slowly so it's not really a commitment, and revisit some books we've all loved or maybe even some newer books

but I guess it’s more of a question of whether that could ever work in practice. like again theoretically I’d love to tie each event in to raising money for a charity (again by public vote). I mean wouldn't it be great to have a reread of GoF where people were encouraged to donate £1 to a charity to support trans people? or maybe raising money to help kids with ADHD when reading PJO?

I think I’m getting too ambitious haha

tbh the real thing that was great about this blog is the community feel it had. a group of people who all love hp and learning and creativity and expressing themselves and so really what I’d like to do is find some way to recapture that, however you guys see fit

I am obviously have no illusions about the fact that this blog is not active, and its followers are (mostly) not active so I know any projects would likely be on a smaller scale. but hey, I started this blog with a following of about 1k on my multi fandom blog so anything can happen when you hit on a good idea

and I think there’s still a great idea lurking here somewhere, I just need a bit of help from you guys to find it

so let me know what you think and I guess I’ll see where the wind takes us

#spring is for new beginnings y’all

[popculturebuffet]

Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life Review

Happy Birthday To Me, as I continue my birthday celebration by taking a look at comics that have a personal connection to me.. And for our main feature, i’m taking a look at the first volume of a series that was vitally important to a teenage me, Scott Pilgrim. 

Scott Pilgrim is the brainchild of Brian Lee’O’Malley. O’Malley came up with the concept from a number of things. Being a fan of the band Plumtree, O’Malley was curious about the name of their song “Scott Pilgrim” and wondered who this Scott Pilgrim guy was. So over the years he slowly built the guy up in the back of his mind using bits of his life and what not. As for why he ends up fighting 7 evil exes, that came from a discussion with his then girlfriend, later wife and currently ex-wife Hope Larson, where he threw off the joke that her exes should form some kind of League. After finishing his first solo work Lost at Sea, O’Malley decided Scotty would be his next project and the rest is history. To date while O’Malley has written two works since, Seconds which is delightful and Snotgirl which didn’t grab me but I intend to try again, Scott remains his most popular work, in large part due to it’s SUBLIME video game and movie adaptations, the former of which is finally getting a rerelease next month. 

The series charm is in it’s style: A manga styled comic that combines two desperate kinds of story: Shonen Fight Manga and Slice of Life Indie Comics. The story shifts from Scott going through normal life stuff while trying to make his new relationship work and get his shit together and Scott getting into big bombastic fights with his new sweetie’s exes for the right to keep dating her and to you know, stay alive. The series effortlesly blends a video game like world with real grounded characters and is wonderful for it.  As for where I came in, one Free Comic Book day I found a little comic named Free Scott Pilgrim, which I genuinely loved and was instantly charmed by it’s humor and well done art. So I picked up the second and third volumes of the series proper and the first once I could find it and the rest ,as they say, is history. For my high school life, this was one of hte most important things in it and I wrote fanfiction, which I thankfully never put online and in general enjoyed the hell out of the series. Then I just kind of.. let it sit on my shelf for a while. It wasn’t BAD, I just never got back to it and as the franchise went dormant I just sorta slept on it and the movie and that part of me...

Cut to a few weeks ago, when Comixology did a massive sale for black friday that marked a ton of Graphic Novels down to just 1 buck each, and the color editions of Scott Pilgrim happened to be part of this, though only volume 1 was that cheap. But thanks to my best friend micheal and an early christmas/birthday present I got the rest and got to revisit the series as a whole, with me rethinking my previous thoughts of volume 1 and thus.. wanting to review it and share both why this series is so damn special and what’s good, and what’s not so good about it. I’ll also be covering the game, once i’ts re-released, and the movie once i’m finsihed with the comics so look out for that. And get ready to take a trip to the glorious land of canada... 

As a heads up and as you can tell i’ll be using the color version as while I could get scans of the black and white, I prefer the color version. While the black and white was fine and always will be, I think the impressive coloring job really adds to thing and makes the already great fight scenes pop more, as well as making certain background elements stand out a bit. While it does negate the black and white gags, the tradeoff is more than worth it. That being said either version is fine so if you can get the black and white cheaper that’s fine and i’ve kept my original copies, with volumes 4 -6 having been picked up as they came out. 

So as our story starts we meet our hero: Scott Pilgrim Age 23, a charming but jobless and kind of sketchy possible college graduate whose really been adrift in his life since a breakup about a year ago. And when our story opens he’s taken a turn for a worse and decided to date sweet but naive and inexperinced Knives Chau, a 17 year old girl. And why yes the power dynamics there are messed up and why yes Scott is pretty damn sketchy in this moment in time, and while yes I am aware the age of consent in canada is 16, it dosen’t make this any less greasy and the story knows that.  And how it knows that MOST of his friends aren’t on board. The only ones who seems to is Stephen Stiles, leader of Sex Bomb-Omb, the band scott’s in with one of the best names ever and even then it’s hard to tell if he’s being sarcastic or just a total douche. The other, Young Neil Nordgraf, Stephen’s roomate, is well 19 or 20 and kind of a dipshit so we just ignore him. I used to use him as kind of a projection, to put myself in the adventure when I was younger as Neil kind of lacks personality in the comics but in the comics.. he’s not hte best or most complex character. He is great in the movie though and Edgar Wright did an amazing job fleshing him out.  The rest of his circle are .. not so permissive. His best friend, roomate and king of all gays for all time Wallace Wells very much does not want to come with Scott to school to pick her up because every part of that sentence after hurt to type. Granted Scott gets him to come with him with promises of boys, but frankly knowing wallace he was probably just playing along/wants to protect this poor child. His ex and fellow bandmate Kim is clearly bothered by it and is flat out worried Scott is taking advantage of her. Kim and Wallace are easily my faviorites both for personality and because I have a massive crush on both. With Wallace it just didn’t manifest till the reread. Finally Scott’s kid sister Stacey chews him out over it before genuinely wondering if he’s gone insane or he’s actually happy. For my two cents: he’s not. He WANTS to be, but he dosen’t know how. And as someone whose both neurotypical, which given Scott’s troubles with empathy and relating to people like yours truly I strongly suggest he is, and has struggled with depression I can relate to that. He wants to move on but he just.. can’t, he just wants to get past the haze he’s been in since Envy dumped him.. but he dosen’t know how. So instead of doing someting constructive or finding a job or anything .. he just took the first and easiest way out of his depression he could. I’ve done that with video games and stuff. Scott did that by entering a relationship that’s really easy, requires only so much effort, and is with someone who utterly adores, looks up to him and will never expect better. Being with Knives makes him feel better.. but it dosen’t MAKE him a better person. As i’ve made clear dating someone just for a boost makes him actively worse and had fate not intervened, I shudder to think what Scott might have become. That being said his actoins are still creepy and since Scott has a habit of landing ass backwards into being an asshole here’s a counter to track that. That’s 2 for doing this overall, one for tleling her to be good, and 1 for trying to ply wallace with underage boys. 

Your the Scum of the Earth Scott Counter: 1

Thankfully fate does and Scott’s dreams, ones of him crawling through a desert alone, are interupted by a mysterious pink haired girl on skates. The next day he’s just sort of in a daze, kind of confused, and even more so when he sees her IN REAL LIFE, while at the library with Knives. He’s understandably frazzled but ends up finding out he’s not hallucinating when talking to MIcheal Cormeau. Micheal is a minor character and another artist and friend of o malley’s who represents that one guy in social circles who knows everybody. And indeed he knows the mystery girl, Ramona Flowers and that she’s there. Scott TRIES talking her up but just creeps her out, so Scott goes with plan b and decides to ask around about her. Enter Sandra and Monique, two college aquantinces of Scott, who just sorta show up at major events and aren’t that developed or intresting. They turn him to Julie who forbids him to date her. To which I say. 

Naturually we’ll aslo be needing a counter for this. 

Shut Up Julie Counter: 1

Scott however did find out she’s a delivery girl for Amazon Canada, and thus orders some CD’s on Wallace’s Credit card to hopefully see her. And while his behavior IS obessive.. it’s understandable. I’d be weirdly obessed with finding someone too if they showed up in my dreams every day and were apparently a real person. I’d probably play it cooler but still i’ts kind of understandable. So after a day with knives in which he’s clearly checked out she kisses him, he freaks out and it’s very clear that while Scott’s good at attracting women he’s just.. not good with his emotions and has finally woken up to how messed up this is, but has no idea how to get out now he’s intrested in someone he actually has a future with maybe.  Speaking of Scott’s package and Ramona finally arrive. Scott’s move is to.. ask her out abrubtly but after he mentions her Dreams, Ramona finally puts two and two together and explains things: She’s been using Subspace, a seris of highways connected by the subconcious and apparently more common in america, though it’s later revealed she was taught this but being the first book with a lot of the lore and what not ironed out this is fine. Point is she was just using his dreams as transit and didn’t mean to get him obessed. Scott continues to try his schtick and eventually gets her to agree to hang out with him. Why she does I generally do not know, as SCott basically fell ass backwards over himself conversationally, but whatever. If he didn’t succeed we wouldn’t have a plot. 

That being said things pick up a bit with the date though. The scene is really good and simply just the two.. talking. Having plesant conversations getting to know one another. That good stuff. it’s just really nice to read and it’s hard to explain why. Highlights include Scott’s x-men patch, Ramona not wanting to talk about her last job and Scott admitting he hasn’t been obessed in a long time.. and it comes off sweet rather htan creepy like that sounds. It just means he hasn’t fell this head over heels felt like this. As I said Knives was easy.. but this is hard.. and this.. feels right. So as things Snow Ramona yanks scott through subspace to escape the blizzard. 

So we end up back at Ramona’s place and she offers some tea which leads to one of the best gags of the volume as she lists them off: 

So Ramona goes to get Scott a blanket, Scott ends up following finds her changing, and she decides to warm him up another way.. by embracing him... cue.. the inevitible really. 

It feels organic though: The two are clearly attracted to each other and while Scott came on as strong as freaking colossus, he still rebounded well once they hung out and he could relax a bit and show the scott underneath the lairs of dumbass. The two end up cuddling in bed and Scott seems..genuiley happy saying he needed this... awwwwwww. They part the next morning with him asking her to his band’s performance. 

So Scott finds Wallace  at home who says what Scott needs to hear “You need to break up with your fake highschool girlfriend scott’ Granted the entire first 40 pages could’ve been titled that but now he’s actively cheating. He’s also got a letter. 

It’s a death threat Scott barely grazes through, just like an email earlier. 

But scott’s more concerned with his emotional distress.. i.e. the consequences of his throughly shitty actions finally hitting him in the face. 

Scott heads to practice for his gig and can’t bring himself to break up with knives, but does find out about the opposition: Crash and the Boys, based on an NES game title because of course it is. Crash, their leader, Joel their baseplayer who scott hates because he hates all other baseplayers (”I don’t hate myself kim) and Trasha, an 8 year old progedy they found playing Drum Mania. Don’t ask me what that is, i’m not going to get every refrence. 

So at the show Scott runs into Stacey and her new boyfriend Jimmy  with Stacey being supportive. And then Knives shows up and then RAMONA SHOWS UP. Oh no scott’s cheating might be discovered! 

So Scott books it while we’re introduced to Crash and the Boys. Wallace heckles them, to the band’s annoyance, until they eventually get fed up and we easly get the best gag of the volume. I was wrong this clearly tops the tea thing. 

So Crash and The Boys continue to play their set, including a song that supposdely kills the audience but really knocks them out.. which of course bothers kim because they play next. Meanwhile Ramona and Stacey meet and the two really get along.. and come back to find the audience ko’d and Wallace Making out with Stacey’s boyfriend. Oh no! Which is a dick move, no question. But Stacey’s next move is questionable even for a 19 year old: She says “You won’t steel another guy from me and tells wallace to sit over there”. Okay Stacey even if he is bi, and this series has trouble with the concept of bisexuals we’ll get into that later trust me, he made out with someone else entirely while on a date with you. Wallace is still an asshole, it’s part of his charm.. but it dosen’t change the fact your date kissed someone else seconds after you were gone and has been eyballing him all night, as seen even above. He’s not into you as you thought, just accept it, move on, and kick Jimmy in the balls and then wallace like a proper lady. So Scott prepares to play and this happens

And it’s here, at the very end of the comic the series main premise finally kicks in and the world takes it’s true shape. It’s a world where an indie comedy about a mess of a being putting his life together after finding his dream girl.. also has said mess being forced to get into fist fights with wizards, movie stars, vegans, half-ninjas, twin roboticists and a katana wielding douchenozzle record exec in order to continue to have the right to date his girlfriend. 

It’s where the series charm comes from and really what made it a huge sucess so it’s no suprise this volume perks up immensley for the climax. I’ll get more into it’s pacing problem at the end. For now it’s fight time and as we find out in a hilarious and awesome turn.. Scott is the best fighter in toronto.. which just makes me REALLLY want a Scott Pilgrim version of letterkenny. I mean who wouldn’t want to see wayne fight some guy who can turn his hands into dragons or see Squireely Dan do E.Honda’s hand slap move from streetfighter or see the skids all fuse into one mega emo. It’s just.. the possiblities are as endless as they are wonderous and I want this now. 

But yeah as Patel is both the first boss and Scott’s first real opponent Scott.. handles him really easily. This was by design as O’Malley wanted a shonen progression to the fights.. and honestly it’s a great way to do things. Since the fights are styled after shonen and video games, and both have power based progression in bad guys and threats, it just made sense. Patel.. is just pathetic even with his magic powers, and his habit of sending letters and emails just pounds it in. Though he is right to be a bit pissed Scott didn’t read a letter he hand delivered in a snowstorm. That’s just a tad rude. 

Mid-Fight, Scott, now he knows the whole evil ex boyfriend thing, wonders what Matt and Ramona’s past is and while Matthew refuses to tell.. Ramona spills easily. It was midddle school, all the jocks wanted her for whatever reason, likely because from experince in high school, guys really like indie girls. Matthew was the only non-white non jock, so they teamed up and with her strength and his mystic powers they beat them.. but since his use had dried up, she flipped him off and left.  Matthew dosen’t take this well and summons demon hipster chicks to fight while Scott and co, minus ramona, fight back with a finger gun routine and block his fire balls before propelling Scott into matthew somehow, and landing the KO Evil Exes Left: 6 Matthew bursts into coins though fun fact, O’Malley says the Exes all respawned back at home afterwords and learned their lesson. With Pattel I genuinely don’t think he did... but clearly given his penchant for formality what with the letters and emails, he probably felt it’d break protocol to attack before the rest were done. He probably jsut formed a hipster emo band and found more sucess using his magic for that instead and just forgot about the whole thing. Could be wrong but that’s what i’m going with.  So Scott asks Ramona to go out with him then make out with him, both of which she says yes to. Nice one scotty boy. Ramona then explains the whole evil exes thing: He’ll have to defeat each one as they come after him, and while Scott wonders if they’ll come one at a time Ramona’s not sure. As time will bear out, Scott is MOSTLY correct as most exes take him one on one, with the exception of the twins. But since as I said earlier the twins are basically one person, and as we’ll find out by choice, so it’s an exception. Plus their the last step before the final boss, so by that token it’s a bit fairer to have the penultimate boss get an unfair advantage. Scott is fine with that, he and Ramona share another moment and a kiss.. but Scott makes the mistake of asking if gideon is one and Ramona’s head starts glowing with her dodging the subject, though still going out with SCott and him worried.. it just feels.. off. not a bad ending but the only one of the series three cliffhanger endings that just dosen’t work for me, especailly since it is a bit before the Gideon mystery really picks up steam again. But with that we close this chapter

FINAL THOUGHTS:

Precious Little Life is a decent start to the story.  While Scott is loathsome at first, he’s still a compelling character and does get more likeable as things go, the humor when it is there shines and is one of the series best assets and while the fight is short and only at the end, it is oh so glorious especailly in cover with the impacts taking cues from the movie. It’s a good intro to Scott’s world and ther’es a reason the movie adapts this book the closest as it sets up the cast and premise well, with only Stephen Stiles feeling a bit off and ONLY for the first few chapters.  The volume is only really held back by it’s pacing, as before Scott runs into ramona in his dream the story feels a bit sluggish as we’re just watching some douche date a high school kid. While it is necessary to set up the world, it just dosen’t have the snappy pacing the series would be known for and that makes the rest of the series more charming. it’s nto BAD.. but it’s not FANTASTIC like the series would become. What keeps it from being bad is simple: These aren’t general badness signs but more just O’Malley coming into his owna nd getitng better and better as the book goes, to the point that by the next book the pacing is much better and by book 3 onwards he has it down pat.  Overall not a BAD volume but certaionly the weakest of the bunch.. which given it’s still really good says something about the ride we’re in for. I’ll be back sometime in the future, likely january. Yup i’m taking on YET ANOTHER PROJECT. but since this one, while clearly exausting and time consuimg, is much shorter in overall length, and i’m still proritizing the three I have running over this, I think i’ll be just fine. Until next time, have a happy holiday. 

#scott pilgrim #scott pilgrims precious little life #ramona flowers #wallace wells #kim pine #stephen styles #knives chau #neil nordgraf #julie powers #matthew pattel #gideon #crash and the boys #reviews #comics #oni press #micheal comereau #stacey pilgrim

[eliotquillon]

the h.i.v.e timeline

(this is going to end up massive, so sorry in advance to all my none h.i.v.e followers).

obligatory disclaimer that while i’m trying to follow canon fairly closely here, i know i might have missed some details; this is a writeup of a google doc i made immediately after my feb reread and while i have reread books 1 and 2 since then, i haven’t had the time to double check anything from dreadnought onwards. there are also canon elements that i am deliberately ignoring/reordering, and i will make it clear that i am doing so when those details come up.

part one: student ages

currently, we only have two canon ages: raven, who is thirty-one in deadlock (or thereabouts; i’m basing this off her being 16 when she tries to kill nero and that being in the 15 years ago flashback), and otto, who we know turns thirteen just before he is sent to h.i.v.e (the specific age comes from the blurb of book one). we also know that nero taught diabolus and duncan cavendish as students, and that h.i.v.e was founded in the 1960s, which seems vague but actually gives us a lot to work with; cavendish’s records being faked implies that h.i.v.e does provide public examination results for its students, and that h.i.v.e’s entry year was deliberately chosen to parallel the english private school system (which, unlike the state system, is split into pre-prep, prep, and senior), where entry to senior school coincidentally takes place at the same age of entry to h.i.v.e

when it comes to making age estimations for students during the various points of the series, i’m making three assumptions:

1. all students in otto’s year are thirteen when they start h.i.v.e, just like otto.

2. otto turns thirteen in august 2006, making him one of the youngest students in his year, assuming the h.i.v.e school year starts in early september like most british schools. most of the ‘age’ section of this hinges off otto, because he’s the only student who is given an age and is seen celebrating a birthday.

3. the six years spent at h.i.v.e span what would be year 9-13 + the first year of university in the british system. in the american system this is grades 8-12 + the first year of university. therefore, students graduate at the age of nineteen.

h.i.v.e:

every first year alpha is thirteen.

the overlord protocol:

this is still set in first year, but is months after the events of book one. otto is still thirteen, but we can assume that, at this point, some people have turned fourteen. my money would be on wing, shelby, and possibly franz as being the older kids in their year (and therefore fourteen), but the semantics don’t really matter.

escape velocity:

this is the first book with a sizeable time skip - we see otto trying to steal the end-of-year exam for second years. this means everyone is now at least fourteen, and because (in my personal experience) late july/august birthdays aren’t very common, i’d wager that shelby, wing, laura, and franz are all fifteen; i’m excluding nigel here because i think, based off his physical description, he’s probably one of the younger kids in his year, and otto is obviously still fourteen, nearly fifteen. this is supported by raven telling otto that she was almost exactly the same age as the core four when she went on her first mission; we know from deadlock that she was sixteen, which would only be a year (max) older than the alphas at this point in time.

dreadnought:

dreadnought is set at the start of third year; we know this because the 93-percenter is specifically a third year field trip. this means that everyone, including lucy, is fifteen.

rogue:

rogue is where our perfectly constructed timeline slips, because it seemingly ages otto backwards - it is set thirteen years after we see otto being cloned in the tank, which would make otto thirteen even though he ends dreadnought at fifteen. there are multiple potential explanations for this - i favour the idea that otto is registered as older than he is biologically because he’s a clone/genius and was left at the orphanage with no birth certificate - but either way, i’m still going to say that otto is fifteen and that everyone else is a third year and either fifteen or sixteen. side note: otto’s benjamin button trick here is one of my least favourite ‘slips’ of the series and ruins what is otherwise one of my favourite entries.

zero hour:

there is a year between rogue and zero hour, meaning zero hour is set in fourth year and that otto is sixteen (and again, everyone else is either sixteen or seventeen). in my original doc, i made a note saying that apparently everyone is still in third year, but based off a quick search for ‘three’ and ‘third’ in the ebook, there’s no proof for that. lucy dies when she’s sixteen/seventeen.

aftershock:

there’s another short timeskip here, and based off the fact that this is when penny and tom join and that it’s the introduction of new security chief dekker, we can guess that this is the beginning of fifth year (incidentally, the fact that nero and raven are available at the beginning of the book to go meet joseph wright in london does appear to suggest that nero wasn’t needed to teach that day, meaning that there is some form of summer holiday at h.i.v.e). i also think it’s likely that this is fifth year because penny and tom a) had time to gain relative notoriety for their thefts and b) would’ve needed to be at least sixteen to leave school and local authority care (although tom is apparently a year or two older than otto and penny according to book one) and it being fifth year sets everyone at seventeen. seventeen is actually pretty old for the alphas to be taken to the glasshouse (raven went at age eleven), but i think it does make sense that the hunt was targeted, and not the third years on the 93 percenter; tom and penny actually had time to go to lessons pre field trip, and lucy didn’t, meaning that the 93 percenter mostly likely happens in the first few days of the school year and was organised before dekker became a member of staff, which wouldn’t have given the disciples the necessary time to plan and execute a retrieval. also, laura was obviously in fifth year and not third, making the hunt a far more attractive choice for anastasia to target.

deadlock:

deadlock is similar to rogue in that it fluffs an important timeline detail, but it’s not relevant to ages here, so i’ll revisit it later. it’s set several months after aftershock, but seeing as no other students are recruited to pad out the three left in the alpha stream and that aftershock was only set in the first month or so of the school year, i think it’s safe to assume that everyone is still in fifth year at this point, so either seventeen or eighteen. my gut feeling is that shelby, franz, and wing are all eighteen, and that’s because they’re allowed on the mission to break into the glasshouse; obviously we see them get into danger/be involved in plans before this point, but this is the first time we see nero actively sign off on them being allowed into a tactical situation with a known risk to life (and i’ve made a shitpost on this, but raven does say that nero would “have her shot” if she brought thirteen year old otto into a tactical situation back in the overlord protocol, so i think the only way nero would’ve allowed this to happen was if the remaining alpha students were all legal adults). the exception to this is otto, who would still be seventeen, but seeing as he isn’t an enrolled h.i.v.e student at the time of the mission, i don’t think nero’s no-student policy applies to him.

book nine:

obviously none of us know what’s going to happen, but i think it’s safe to say book nine will probably be set in otto’s final year, when he’s eighteen.

part two: adult ages

really, i should just be transparent and call this what it is, which is just blatant nero age speculation. while it’s implied that nero is immortal in book one, this is also literally never mentioned again, and the only physical indicator we know is that he has a streak of grey in his hair. however, i do have a bunch of info that can give some clues at how old nero really is.

1. nero taught diabolus, and is implied to have been headmaster of h.i.v.e at this time. we’re not really sure how old diabolus is, either, but seeing as he has a teenaged son and was old enough to have had a considerable career and be made head of g.l.o.v.e, he can’t be any younger than his late thirties by the time he pops up in escape velocity, and i’m guessing he’s inching towards fifty purely because he isn’t described as being particularly young when we see him in hong kong with nero 15 years before the events of deadlock. (i am, however, aware that this means nothing, because walden sucks at describing people). that means nero’s been teaching some forty years, which lines up with him co-founding h.i.v.e with his father in the 60s, and seeing as h.i.v.e is nero’s great passion project, i don’t think he could’ve been any younger than 25 when h.i.v.e opened in the original icelandic facility. basically, this tells us what we already know: nero is old as shit, and doesn’t look it.

2. the duncan cavendish thing interests me a lot more, because we see that nero actively switched cavendish from polfi to alpha. again, it was already implied that nero was headmaster from the beginning, but this shows that nero was always running the show and wasn’t just initially his father’s apprentice as deadlock almost seems to hint at.

3. nero has a doctorate. “well duh”. but again, if nero had that doctorate when he founded h.i.v.e, he has to be nearing seventy. he could’ve gotten it earlier, sure, because nero is a very intelligent man, but he’s not otto-levels of academic genius. i don’t think he could’ve been any younger than 15/16 when he got his phd.

i did say that this would be an ‘adult ages’ section, so i’ll do a bit of background on raven, the only adult with timestamps. her being thirty one in deadlock makes her twenty seven in book one (if we follow the logic of otto being seventeen in deadlock), and because i personally believe the h.i.v.e timeline starts with book 1’s publication in 2006, this means raven was born around 1979 (which, if you subscribe to the theory that raven is elena and nero’s kid, makes her born after h.i.v.e was founded, which has some interesting implications about the origins of the glasshouse).

i know we’re all in mutual agreement about the soviet training being a bullshit throwaway line that walden wrote in before deciding to make raven a major player, but i’ll do the work of disproving it anyway: if raven was born in ‘79 and she came to the glasshouse at 11, that means she started her training in 1990. the soviet union officially fell in 1991, but the berlin wall fell in 1989, and the cold war was pretty much over by the time raven came to the glasshouse thanks to gorbachev’s new policies and military cuts. there is absolutely no way that the furans were soviet-funded, or that raven was trained by the soviet government. in fact, the only feasible way raven could’ve been trained by the soviet union in, quote from book 1 here, “their cold war prime”, would be for her to have been born almost a full 20 years earlier in the early 1960s, which would’ve made her middle aged in book 1. but, like, you tried walden.

part three: overlord

the overlord incident - the one that led to the destruction of the chinese facility and inadvertantly led to wing’s birth thanks to wu zhang and xiu mei shacking up together - is probably the most crucial part of the h.i.v.e timeline. without it, number one never would’ve been corrupted, otto wouldn’t have been born/manufactured, the seed code for h.i.v.emind wouldn’t have existed, cypher never would’ve launched his assault on h.i.v.e and nero (or felt the need to come into existence at all), and, of course, overlord himself wouldn’t have been the world’s most annoying LED lightshow for five books (because book one hardly counts). but even though raven had nothing to do with the original overlord incident, she’s still strongly linked to it. i’ll explain.

the overlord incident had to have happened before raven met nero. i can’t stress that enough, and this is the conflicting detail that i mentioned in deadlock. the nero’s internal monologue in the fifteen years before flashback appears to indicate that the overlord incident hasn’t happened yet - but that can’t be true, otherwise wing wouldn’t exist.

like i’ve laid out, wing is thirteen in late august 2006, and most likely eighteen (but at least seventeen) in 2010/11, aka deadlock. this gives him an approximate birth year of 1992/3, and all roads lead back to raven, who would’ve been fourteen when wing was born. already, that makes her too young to have met nero pre-overlord incident. but even more importantly, wu zhang and xiu mei only ended up together because of the overlord incident. like i said, if it weren’t for overlord, wing would not exist. we don’t know when wu zhang and xiu mei‘s friendship turned to romance, but if xiu mei got pregnant in 1992 (which fits with either of wing’s birth years - either he’s late ‘92 or early ‘93), i’d wager they got together in 1991 at the latest. raven would’ve been twelve.

i’m putting the overlord incident at a tentative year 1990, which would’ve allowed plenty of time for xiu mei and wu zhang to escape china together and fall in love before wing’s birth, and also gives overlord a handful of years to start corrupting number one to convince him into cloning himself to make otto (who was dropped off at the orphange in august ‘93). raven came to the glasshouse in 1990. there is absolutely no way she could’ve met nero while he was still making arrangements for overlord, unless wing was born after 1995 when raven tried to kill nero, in which case wing wouldn’t have been at h.i.v.e at the same time as shelby and laura (and nor would otto, come to think of it).

anyway, i’ll do a tl;dr with the final timeline below.

TL;DR (final timeline)

1960s: h.i.v.e is founded.

1979: raven is born.

1980s: both duncan cavendish and diabolus darkdoom presumably attend h.i.v.e during this period. the zero hour contingency plan is drawn up.

1990: overlord is created in a lab in northern china, and is destroyed by number one. it then takes up host in his body. there are three named survivors: nero, wu zhang, and xiu mei. raven is sent to the glasshouse.

1991: wu zhang and xiu mei move to japan and rename themselves as the fanchus. they fall in love around this point. this is also the year where raven tries to escape from the glasshouse and claws out pietor’s eye.

1992: overlord/number one starts work on cloning himself. xiu mei falls pregnant, and possibly gives birth.

1993: otto, shelby, wing, nigel, franz, laura and lucy are all born at varying points throughout the year. this is most likely also the year where dimitri is shot by anastasia furan, and raven is forced to murder tolya.

1994: presumably the year when h.i.v.e’s original location is compromised, and plans start being made to relocate from the icelandic facility.

1995: nero meets with the architect/his father to discuss his plans for the new h.i.v.e facility. raven tries to kill him. the first glasshouse burns.

1996-2005: construction on h.i.v.e 2.0 is completed. overlord slowly takes over more and more of number one’s body. survivors of the overlord incident start disappearing. xiu mei dies of unknown causes. nero receives his half of the amulet. lucy’s parents die of natural causes and she is sent to italy. gregori leonov’s son, yuri, attends h.i.v.e and graduates. cypher pops into existence around this time. diabolus darkdooms fakes his death.

2006: otto, wing, laura, shelby, franz, and nigel start attending h.i.v.e (cue the events of book one). duncan cavendish becomes prime minister.

2007: cypher launches his assult on nero after successfully convincing the contessa to join his cause. after cypher is captured and his identity is revealed, nero keeps him alive unbeknownst to number one. by august, everyone is fourteen.

2008: cue the events of escape velocity. number one and the contessa die. diabolus darkdoom is elected leader of g.l.o.v.e. cue the events of interception point. otto turns fifteen. lucy joins h.i.v.e at the beginning of september and the events of dreadnought take place. otto does not return to h.i.v.e.

2009: events of rogue. cypher and pietor furan die. otto turns sixteen at the end of august. laura’s baby brother, douglas, is conceived.

2010: douglas is born. the events of zero hour occur. lucy dies. overlord is destroyed. nero becomes leader of g.l.o.v.e and fires the ruling council. duncan cavendish steps down. construction of the new glasshouse is completed. otto turns seventeen. penny and tom join h.i.v.e. the events of aftershock occur, and otto is expelled.

2011: the events of deadlock occur. raven turns thirty one. tom dies. the new glasshouse is destroyed. the countdown for the disciples’ new batch of clones begins at 99 days. the artemis project discover the existence of h.i.v.e. at the end of year, otto is eighteen.

2012 onwards: otto turns nineteen and hopefully graduates h.i.v.e.

#h.i.v.e #otto malpense #the overlord protocol #escape velocity #deadlock #rogue #zero hour #aftershock #long post

[lukaafrancesca]

Writing Tips: A Master Post

These are writing tips, rules, and habits that I picked up over the years. This is just what works for me, not necessarily what will work for everyone. As with ALL writing advice, if anything I say here deters or discourages you from your writing, DO NOT LISTEN TO THE ADVICE AND WRITE HOW YOU WANT TO WRITE. Advice is supposed to help you get better where you feel you’re lacking, not prohibit you from doing something you like. Remember that even if your goal is to write for a wider audience, if you hate writing, you’ll never finish, therefore anything that makes you hate writing needs to be eliminated from your life, or at the very least, eliminated from your drafting phase of writing. Write for yourself and your happiness first and foremost, especially in the first draft. That’s you. That’s personal. That’s joy. If you’re already having fun, don’t listen to a word I say or read any further until you’re seriously considering refining your story into something you want to sell. Disclaimer: While I have won prize money for poetry, I am by no means an expert author, nor am I officially published yet with any sort of prestige. If authority matters to you, there are plenty of published authors that also have guides on how to get your work published. While good advice can come from anyone, it is important to disclose that I am not an expert and I do not have a fool-proof plan for how to write well or how to be published. This is just a collection of what I’ve learned over the years and things I think would be important to my younger self. So without further ado, writing advice. Outlining: While I don’t outline the way you might have learned in English/Literature class in school, I do have a similar process. For my writing, I create an appendix/guide/glossary type of thing. It’s a collection of key words, characters, places, items, and events written specifically for the story or the world my story is set in. I know they call it a "Bible" when it comes to TV shows, but I'm not sure the term applies to writing books. But you can call it your project bible. I call it my project appendix, but I know the term isn’t quite right, so for the remainder I will refer to it as “the project bible.” This is where you write down everything important that you want to be in your book, even details that you don’t want to reveal expressly to the readers. Someone has a mother that they don’t know is their mother? Write it in your project bible. Have a Magic McGuffin that does something super special that your reader is only supposed to find out about in the eleventh hour? Put it in the project bible. Have a really nifty idea for a scene? Put it in the bible. I do this so that I don't forget details and accidentally write down contradictory information. You can do this with or instead of a general outline or as part of your brainstorming phase when plotting ideas for your book. Remember to revisit the project bible often to add in characters you created spur of the moment or to add in any cool ideas you think up while writing. While you shouldn’t add to the project bible during your dedicated writing time so you don’t disrupt your flow, if it’s a detail that’s not relevant to your current chapter, you should definitely write it down if you’re habitually forgetful like I am. But what I prefer to do is to write a note at the end of the current chapter and add it to the project bible when the chapter is finished.  Beginning Writing (and the First Stumbling Block): Once my project bible is more or less complete, I start writing from the beginning. Then I get stuck and have writers block and cry. Then I play video games to cope with my performance anxiety. Then I wait 3 months for inspiration. This is the stage you want to avoid. Don't be like me. Instead, set a schedule. Have one or two hours a day set aside to write. I find I do best when I write first thing in the morning. This time is JUST for writing. Do not do research during this time, do not check social media, do not add to the project bible at this time unless absolutely necessary. You sit down and write and you do not stop for anything except the bathroom or an emergency. You do not backtrack. You do not rewrite. You do not read back what you wrote. You just write. If you get to a detail you're not sure of or a word you can't spell just get as close as you can to the general idea, write in a symbol or an uncommon letter pattern (TK is the standard) so that if you're on a computer you can Ctrl+F back to that spot during the editing phase. Write during that hour or two non-stop until you finish the chapter. You can keep going from there if you have lots of time dedicated to writing, but once I finish a chapter, I go into the Alpha Edit. If you have lots of time dedicated to writing and you’re in the flow, DO NOT STOP. Stopping is what gives you time to be self-critical, and that’s a major stumbling block for me. If you have the flow, DO NOT STOP. If your dedicated writing period is longer than 4 hours (and it may be because 2020 is a hell year and some of us don’t have jobs right now) remember to get up, stretch, drink water, and consume calories. But if you can avoid breaking your flow without detriment, DO IT. Flow is one of the most important things to writing, and a good flow can have you cranking out 50 pages in a single day if you’re lucky. Good flow can see you finish a short story in 3 days. My good flow days are the most valuable to me. When they come to you, do your best not to waste them.

Alpha Editing Phase: Once the chapter is done, reread it. Out loud is best so you can check the flow. If you stumble across a word, rewrite the sentence so it flows better. If you have any TK notes or words you want to change, this is the time to do research and change the notes. You do not have to do this during your scheduled writing time, but doing it during that time helps keep routine and trains your brain to want to write during that time. Just remember that if you do your editing during your writing time, you should try to work on writing your next chapter during at least half of your dedicated writing time. If you find something inconsistent with your outline or lore, change it. The editing phase is the ideal time to consult your project bible, add notes to it, and check for inconsistencies. If you have to "delete" something, DO NOT DELETE IT. Copy and paste it into a deleted scenes file with context (surrounding sentences) in case you want to use the idea or sentence somewhere else or want to change back to it during the final edit. If you're changing the sentence, that's fine. Most sentence changes only need to change the specific words but not what’s actually being said. But if you delete a sentence or paragraph or scene or passage, save it with context. You can keep it just for you, or you can refer to it during a later edit in case you change your mind again. Once you have all your spelling correct and all your TK notes filled with the proper information you have some choices. You either continue on to the next chapter if you're writing a book to publish all at once, or you move on to your beta reader if you're serializing your work. Beta readers come in after your book is done or after the chapter you want to publish is done. Beta Readers: After your alpha edit, get a few people to look over your work. All of them can be friends and family, but beware of "yes men." If your friends and family only ever say your work is good, find a more critical audience. While it’s nice to have praise, if none of your beta readers ever ask you to change anything, you run the risk of missing things that are detrimental to your work like errors with tone, clunky exposition dumps, writing about a sensitive subject without any sensitivity, and many other stumbling blocks. A beta reader can be your friend, but they shouldn’t ALWAYS put your feelings over the quality of your manuscript. A quality beta reader will sometimes butt heads with you, and it’s important you listen when they do. While a beta reader does not replace an editor, editors cost money, and a good beta reader will save you some time with your editor if you choose to hire one for your work when it’s completed. A beta reader’s primary usefulness is that their fresh eyes will catch spelling and grammar errors you and your software might miss and they'll be able to check for issues with tone, consistent lore, tedious exposition, run on sentences, and a myriad of other details that you might not be able to catch.  After the beta readers, you do a Beta Edit. You take all that advice you got from your betas, decide whether to follow it or not, and then change whatever you need to about the story. After that, sit on your “finished” chapter for a week. Do not look at it, do not reread it unless you need to check a plot detail for a future chapter (which should probably be in your outline/ project bible anyway but not everyone uses an outline.) Basically do not look at or think about your "finished" chapter for a week. This is so you yourself have fresh eyes when you revisit it. The "Final" Edit: I say final in quotes because serialized work may need to be retconned or edited in the future so the edit might not always be final unless it's for a completed book. During the final edit, you read it one last time, aloud. Ideally, your book will be done for this stage, but if you publish through a site like Inkitt or Tablo, the urge to serialize a work to get feedback is very strong in the digital age and I don’t blame you at all for wanting to publish a finished chapter to get feedback before your actual book is finished. (Please be wary of the terms and conditions of the site you choose to publish to if you publish a serialized work through a publishing site. If a site mentions having exclusive rights to your content, it’s not a good idea to publish through them if you plan to publish the final work through a different venue or seek traditional publishing and are using the site for archival and viewership purposes.) If you didn't have an outline before, write one as you read back your work. If you have one, make sure, as you read, that it's consistent with the outline. When you're done read the outline and make sure everything you wanted in the book/chapter is in the book/chapter, make sure the lore is consistent, make sure you like it. Make any final corrections. Check your deleted scenes and make sure there's nothing that you want to keep in there. You may choose to keep your deleted scenes file, as I do, but you may also wish to delete it once the book is finished. While either of these choices are entirely yours, remember that every deleted scene is still something you put work into, and there’s no shame in recycling some of the prose into a later story with different characters. Publishing: Decide whether to pursue traditional or digital self-publishing. On scams and more check here.  Digital Self-Publishing: Amazon is a tempting option, especially because many readers will search for books exclusively on Amazon because they are one of the cheapest options around and even if you publish traditionally, your publishing house will usually still sell through Amazon. While I personally don’t like Amazon on principle for it’s poor treatment of warehouse workers, it is worth considering that Amazon’s competitors are not well known and you have very little chance at success when Amazon is the leading name in online book and eBook retail. If you decide to go with another online publishing company, make sure they don’t have exclusive rights to your work so you can bail if a better offer comes along or if they start going under. Signing a contract or publishing exclusively limits you so if you do decide to go that route make absolutely sure you trust the company you’ll be making your business partner by publishing through them. If you decide to publish through Amazon as an E-Book, I recommend doing it yourself. Don't pay for a service that does it for you (I mentioned Inkitt and Tablo and while I do use their services for sharing my work with friends and the public, I would not elect to publish through them since the only benefit to me is that they can do the hard work for me and I’d much rather do it myself.) You can buy your own ISBN numbers and commission cover art from artists so really there's nothing you can't do yourself when it comes to self-publishing, you just need to know-how. Make sure you have the right to use the image you have on your cover, either by designing it yourself, commissioning it from an artist or photographer, or by using a royalty-free image. Remember that some fonts also require royalties if you use them commercially! Double check that you have the rights to use the typeface you have on your cover and in your book. Keep in mind that if you want to have a physical copy of your book that you need to check that the digital publishing service you choose has a print-to-order option. Amazon does, but not every site will. The Cons of Digital Self-Publishing: If you self-publish, don't expect to sell more than 1000 copies without doing some SERIOUS advertising on your own. Digital self-publishing has the perks of letting you keep more of your profits and rights, but it also has it’s downsides, namely that if you want to maximize profits AND sell more than 1000 copies, you need to do all the legwork yourself. A bookstore won’t just buy your book to put on shelves just because it exists, especially not stores like Barnes and Noble. Find the small, local bookshops in your area, get a couple books printed off and ask if they’d like to host an event for your book release. Tell everyone you meet that you wrote a book and show off your personal copy. Find online book groups and advertise there (Remember to advertise often, but not more than, say, 3 times a day for a week. There’s a point where getting the word out becomes blatant spam and spam will reduce and not increase interest.) If your local library takes donations, get a copy printed and donate it. Offer free or discounted copies to YouTubers that do book reviews in exchange for reviews and feedback. Have a Patreon or website where people can find you. If you’re willing to shell out cash and take risks, pay for ads/promoted posts on Facebook and other social media outlets. Go out to events in your hometown or nearby cities and promote the hell out of your book. Rub elbows. Keep a couple signed copies in your trunk and go ham. If you see someone reading a book, start up a conversation, ask them about their book. If it’s anything like yours, tell them that you’ve been reading a good book recently and name drop your own book if you think they won’t remember you or talk about a similar book that inspired you and let them know you wrote a book of your own. You’ll have to bust your tail for it, but if you do it right, you can get your book out there.  Traditional Publishing: If you publish traditionally, be aware that you will get many, many rejection letters. Before seeking traditional publishing, research the publishing house and the industry standards. Many times, they won’t even look at your manuscript if your book is “too long” or “too short.” That doesn’t necessarily mean you should change your book to fit industry standards, but it does mean publishing will be much harder if you don’t fit the standards because very few publishing houses will look at your work unless you know someone who can put in a good word for you. Even if you meet industry standards, expect rejection letters because you’re a first-timer and “a nobody” and most publishing houses get thousands of manuscripts every day and they’re going to pick manuscripts that seem like they’ll make money, or manuscripts from authors they already know, not necessarily manuscripts that are actually “good” writing. A rejection letter is not a reflection of your skills. It’s a badge of honor. You wrote a book and someone looked at it long enough to decide it wasn’t for them. Increase your odds of getting published by focusing a lot of energy into your first chapter, first paragraph, first sentence. If you have a good opening sentence, the person reviewing your manuscript will read more. If you have a good paragraph backing up that first sentence, they’ll go in even deeper. If your first chapter slaps and intrigues, then they’re on the hook wanting more. A publishing house is much more likely to accept your submission if the person who reviewed your work sinks some time into reviewing it. If you get them hooked with the first chapter even if chapters 2 and 3 suck, that reviewer is much more likely to look for the GOLD you put into chapter 4 or 5 when you really hit your stride. If your book doesn’t catch them with chapter 1, even if chapter 5 is absolutely on par with the classics of Shakespeare and the modern greats George R.R. Martin, they’re never going to read that far if chapter 1 sucks. If you get an acceptance letter, huzzah! Work with your publishing house on the final details. Usually a publishing house will do cover art and pay for the advertising necessary to market your book, but not all of them, which is why doing your research is important so you know what to expect. More Detailed Advice: If you have writer’s block try to write anyway. Remember that your first draft will be trash and you can delete anything you don’t like later, but you can’t edit or improve on work that you don’t have finished. Getting it written is way more important than getting it written well. Because, as I said, you can’t work to improve something you don’t have. Getting it on paper is the biggest hurdle. After that, editing is just a matter of reading and rereading, tweaking words and sentences, comparing what you wrote to your outline, and asking for advice from beta readers. Putting it all on paper might take you far less time than editing, but it is, to me far harder. You can pay people to edit your work. There are professional editors out there. But no one can get it on paper like you can, even if you can pay for a ghost writer, because your vision is entirely your own and only you know what you want out of your story idea. Things to Try When the Writing Doesn’t Come: Coffee, water, snack, nap, walk outdoors, bounce ideas off a friend, write a 100 word short story off a prompt and then try again. Any or or all of these shouldn’t take up more than half your scheduled writing time. Sometimes the reason you can’t write is because you’re trying to hard, and these small breaks can make a world of difference, not to mention coffee helps some concentrate, hunger and thirst are distractions even if you don’t feel hungry or thirsty, and time spent just walking and clearing your head in nature can refresh your mind and give you a level head since working through frustration rarely leads to good results. A 100 word short story gets your brain writing something with the focus away from your book, something your brain may see as a monolithic and intimidating task, and distracts it with something short and fun. Once you prove to your brain that yes, you can write right now and once you’ve already started something, it’s easier to make your brain keep working on the next thing. Bouncing ideas off friends can help you figure out why you’re stuck or help you remember that great idea you had for your chapter last night but forgot after you slept. A nap can clear your head and let you relax and you have time alone to think instead of write. If all else fails, try to write just one sentence, take a 15 minute break, and then come back to continue writing. Tried That, Can’t Write: If, for whatever reason, you CAN’T write no matter what you try, no matter how much you force it, take a break. Try again the next day. If the next day doesn’t work, give it a week. After a week if you STILL can’t write, reread what you have written backwards. If you stumble somewhere, edit that section. If ALL of it is either “good enough, but I still can’t continue somehow” or you just hate all of it, ask yourself a few questions. “Is the scene I’m writing important? What does the character accomplish in this scene and does it HAVE to be this scene? What does this scene reveal about the plot, the characters, their motivations, or the story at large. What will this scene mean for the characters in a future scene? What does the character learn here or what do the readers learn in this scene? Is this scene a payoff for something set up in a previous scene or does it bring closure to a subplot or character arc?  If you find positive answers, reformat your chapter around those answers. “Yes this scene is important because it’s where the MC learns to believe in themself.” Great, go back and make sure everything in the scene reflects that and keep moving forward from that perspective while keeping the next goal “The MC’s first success with Plot Thing A.” in mind. Keep this scene focused on the MC believing in themself while working toward their first success. If the scene isn’t important or nothing’s really happening, skip or delete the scene/chapter and move on to the next interesting scene where you find positive answers to those questions. Remember that even if you don’t plan on keeping the scene when you decide to delete it to add it to the deleted scenes file just in case, you may be forgetting a critical plot point or a good idea in the deleted section that you might need later and you’ll be grateful you saved the segment later on. This and more to try here. When You Just Hate Everything You Wrote No Matter What: Read something that inspired you before. Or watch a TV show or movie that made you want to write. Send your work to your beta reader early for feedback. Or, deal with the source of your anxiety. Are you hating it because you feel like it’s not impressive to others? It’s similar to impostor syndrome. You like the writing, but you hate reading it because you think other people will hate it. Send it to a beta reader and find out for sure. If they hate it, that’s fine. You can fix it. If they love it, GREAT. Now you know that at least one person out there likes it. More people will like it. Don’t let the critics in your head tell you otherwise. Do you hate it because you think you can do better? Then do better. Put the scene in the deleted scenes file. All of it. Every part that you hate and the context around it. Dump it. Start over fresh. If you hate that too, compare and see if you hate it less than the old version. Go with the version you hate least, or combine all the parts you hate least and move on until you figure out an even better way to write it. Are you hating it because you never wrote a scene like that before and it’s just really hard? Read stories or watch movies that do the thing you’re doing in a way that you like. Find out why you like it. Try to replicate that in your scene.  This and more about writing anxiety here. “Said is Dead” and Other “Bad” Writing Advice: “Never say said! Use other verbs to convey HOW the character is saying something! Yelled! Sobbed! Laughed! Growled! Whispered!” Most of us got this in grade school. And sometimes they’re right. There’s a difference in tone when you use “‘Hurry up,’ he said.” versus “‘Hurry up,’ she growled.” But if your characters are just having a dialogue, unless there’s a tone you need to set, you CAN use “said” and other plain words. I prefer not to, because I either use taglines like “‘That’s better.’ He smirked, walking across the room.” or I don’t use taglines at all “Really?” “Yeah really.” “Well dang, I didn’t know people could just do that!” “When it’s two people, you sure can!”  In the same vein: “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” While it’s true that it’s more powerful to say “His sentences blended together” or “the words came out nearly overlapped, narry a breath between them.” if you write that way all the time, it’s going to sound weird and won’t always convey the same mood as what you want. Sometimes it’s okay to say “he said quickly.” or “His sentence ended abruptly.” Yes, dashed or sprinted are usually better words than “ran quickly” and are faster to say than “He was down the hall faster than greased lightning.” But remember that adverbs are not the devil. Adjectives are okay. Starting a sentence with “but” is fine for impact. Dialogue has no rules other than “does it sound like something someone would say?” Ending a sentence with a preposition is fine, especially in dialogue. You can use ellipsis points (...) to indicate a pause in dialogue. If you don’t like the writing advice someone gave you, you don’t have to take it. The only real rules I try to stick by are “try to spell everything properly and use proper grammar unless it’s for dialogue” and “make sure it’s easy to read.” Like, I hate when people write “should of” when they mean “should’ve” or “should have” I hate that stuff with a passion. But unless I’m the one person you’re trying to impress, you literally DO NOT HAVE TO CARE. You can write “should of.” It’s your book. I am not the authority on all books. I am not the library god. What I like is not nearly as important as what YOU like. But do take that under advisement that grammatically correct books and properly-spelled manuscripts are way more likely to get published because the world of English literature is elitist as all heck because the rules were written back when hardly anyone was literate and people hang on to traditions like that whether they’re helpful or not. As long as people can understand what you wrote, that’s all that matters in regards to “rules.” So if a rule makes you unhappy? Forget the rule and write what you want. Writer Cartels: A writing cartel is especially important for new authors and self-published authors. A writing cartel is essentially a big group or club of fellow writers. This is your main resource for writing advice, research, a good source of beta readers, free advertisement, and inspiration. Your cartel is going to be there to support you while you write your book and after you get published. You can look for writers groups on social media platforms or by visiting libraries/looking for writing conventions in your town. The comments section of YouTube book reviews has a fair number of people. Make friends. Start your own writer cartel. Join a writer’s workshop program or a writers workshop discord since everything’s closed in 20/20 for the ‘Rona. If there’s a creative writing course at your local community college and you can afford it, take the course, make contacts, make friends with the people you meet there, stay in touch, and form a cartel with them.

“Kill your Darlings”, Crutch Tropes, Crutch Words, and Other Quirks: Kill your darlings is a piece of writing advice you tend to hear a lot. It basically means “Sometimes you have to cut out a cool scene or a neat detail or a beloved character because it doesn’t add anything to your book, weighs down the chapter, ruins the flow, or just generally doesn’t belong and takes up valuable word’s that could be used to advance the plot instead.” Tom Bombadil from Lord of the Rings is a famous example. “Darlings” and crutch tropes are similar but a crutch trope isn’t always a darling and a darling isn’t always a crutch trope. A “darling” is basically anything you like as the author that you want to keep that either all your betas HATE or that holds your writing back in some way. For instance, I like to show off when writing. I wrote a whole scene about different pieces of a ship’s rigging because I knew a lot of the terms and learned a bunch more to get familiar with ships for a scene that has ships in it. But it’s not important to my character to know what a clew garnet is. It’s not important to my readers to know what the clew garnet is. The clew garnet doesn’t serve any deeper purpose in my story other than showing off that I know what that piece of rigging is called. So I removed that scene from my book. I trimmed out all the rigging terms and explanations that weren’t relevant to what was actually happening in the scene, stuck to simple terms, and shortened that chapter by a good chunk by doing so. There’s nothing important missing from the story and it reads just as well without the rigging explanations. That is “killing your darling.” A crutch trope can be a darling, too, but only if you use it excessively. I know I have crutch tropes. I really love chewing the scenery in my stories and I really, REALLY love excessively describing food. Literally chew-able scenery. My book would be a lot shorter without those scenes since they serve no larger purpose other than giving the characters just a hair’s breadth more depth by saying “Yeah, Character A likes X food. And Character B likes Y food. Now you know.” This is a “darling” and a crutch trope. Whether I choose to kill this darling is up to me. But if it’s just a thing you do often, such as writing dream sequences in all your works, then it’s just a crutch trope and not a darling. But you may still want to kill it. Crutch Words: I often use the word “rather” when I actually mean “very.” “He was rather famished.” “She was rather tired.” While this does keep you a step removed from obvious adverb addiction, it becomes rather innocuous and you tend to not notice it or give it rather much thought until it’s become rather ubiquitous and taken up rather a lot of your rather limited word count. (And as you can see, that can get... annoying.) When the word swarms your prose to the point it’s almost more common than your articles “a/the” it’s a crutch word. I already gave you an example with rather, but it happens with more than adverbs and adjectives. Verbs can be crutch words too. If all your characters sob and none of them ever weep, sob is your sadness crutch word. If all of your characters smile and none of them grin, smiled is your happiness crutch word. When is a crutch word not a crutch? When you NEED it for the sentence to make sense. If it’s important to know “He smiled and she smiled back,” there’s no reason to change it to something excessive and potentially inaccurate with “He grinned at her and she simpered in return.” If someone says “I would rather do this than do that,” the “rather” is no longer a crutch. My general rules are: other than articles and common words like “a, the, it, that, what, etc.” you shouldn't have a word used more than once in the same paragraph and definitely not in the same sentence i.e. “Her eyes glazed over as she eyed the enchanted item.” Eye is used in both eyes and eyed and it sounds clunky. A better version of the sentence would be “Here eyes glazed over as she gazed at the enchanted item” or “Her eyes glazed over as she observed the enchanted item.” If you have a crutch trope, and it’s broad i.e. chewing the scenery, try not to do it more than once per chapter. And if it’s a highly specific trope like a dream sequence, use it no more than once per book. But again, these are just rules that I personally follow. I am not God. Write what you enjoy and only take my advice if you agree with it. More on Darlings and how to kill them here. Fringe Crutch Words and How to Cope: There are only so many ways to say “smiled” in the English language, and there are many different smiles that mean many different things. A friendly smile and a sheepish grin are different things, but we don’t always have words to describe different smiles. You can describe a wide smile as beaming and a coy smile as a simper, we have words for sneers and grimaces, but a pained smile has no single word of its own. A sympathetic smile does not have a unique word. Sometimes a sad smile is just a sad smile and if there’s no other way to say it, just use the “crutch” word. Even if you think your characters “smile too much.” Don’t antagonize trying to find a perfect word or you risk falling into “Thesaurus Syndrome” by trying to avoid a word that you simply can’t avoid. Thesaurus Syndrome: Know what your words actually mean, including their connotation. Connotation is the idea or feeling a word evokes, rather than it’s pure definition. For example: stench, scent, and aroma all mean “smell” but a stench or odor is almost always a bad smell; I can’t recall ever seeing a good smell labeled as, say, a “sweet stench.” Similarly, one would never call the scent of skunk spray a “perfume” or “aroma.” “Scent” is very context-sensitive and thus neutral in connotation. So when you use a thesaurus to vary your words, make sure the connotations are the same and that you know how much bigger “gargantuan” sounds compared to just “large.” Flowery words: “Cerulean orbs” is a meme for a reason. Fancy words are all well and good, but jargon runs the risk of alienating your audience. Going back to my clew garnet example, basically no layperson that’s not obsessed with sailing knows what a clew garnet is or what it’s for. If the word isn’t necessary to your story, don’t use it. And if it is, but it’s an uncommon word, make sure to give context or define it in some way. You don’t want to alienate your audience. When it comes to poetic language, i.e. cerulean orbs, it’s important to keep a few things in mind. When you use poetic language, it makes the thing you’re describing automatically more important than anything you describe in a mundane way. If you describe your main character as “a dude with a shaggy beard.” and then describe a trash can as “a silvery vessel for all the unwanted scraps, a prison for the castaways, the lonely, cold, metal receptacle for evidence of a human life, lived to it’s messy, pure, fullness,” that trash can sounds WAY more important than your main character and you also sound like a weirdo for describing a trash can like that. If you want to describe something exceptional, use poetic language, if you want to describe the mundane, use mundane language. A red scarf is nothing more than a scarf that is red. But a crimson scarf sounds significant. However, even when you describe something significant with poetic language, there is a point where too much is too much. Hence “cerulean orbs” instead of “blue eyes.” Cerulean orbs sits right in the middle of foreign/unnatural speech, overly poetic, and overly mundane. No one regularly calls blue eyes “cerulean orbs,” so it immediately sounds alien and unnatural. But it’s also not poetic enough to come from, say, a lover describing her partner’s beautiful blue eyes. “His eyes were deep and dark, the blue like the blue of a midnight sea, shimmering as the candlelight flickered across his irises,” is a much more fitting piece of prose if you want to give off a sense of beauty and the sublime. But if it’s just someone that has blue eyes? You want to go full mundane. “He had blue eyes” is all we need to know. Don’t over-complicate it. That’s not to say you should never write the sublime as mundane or the mundane as sublime, but that’s generally reserved for actual poetry and not part of prose, so unless your book’s main theme revolves around the beauty of common/ugly things or how utterly unremarkable even the most romanticized things are, you want to stick to the general rule that poetic language is reserved for things that are special to your narrative and that mundane language is usually fine everywhere else. Remember, you’re not trying to show off for your audience and you’re not trying to talk down to them. Some Things Specific to Fantasy Writing: The next few sections are dedicated to struggles I personally experienced when writing fantasy and how I overcame them. “How Can She Have a French Braid if There is No France?” and Other Linguistic Troubles: Generally speaking, if you’re writing a fantasy novel, it will not be set on our Modern Earth, and even if it is, there are sometimes troubles. Say your world is fairly unique, something like Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Your elves wear their hair in braids as a tradition. The braid style for upper-class elves is a French braid, unlike the Fishtail Braid which is relegated to the commoners. But wait. Nowhere in your world is called “France” so how can it be a “French Braid?” My rule on this is as follows: Things like French Doors and French braids are very specific and aren’t easily described smoothly in prose as “A set of floor to ceiling/ tall double doors that are made with glass.” or “a braid of three strands, in a gathered plait, from the crown of one’s head to the nape of one’s neck.” If you have to describe it like that EVERY time, it will get tiresome, and if you invent a new word for it, your readers will have to be constantly reminded what it means. With terms like these, it’s okay to use the eponymous word or the namesake word. If your character wears a Tam O’Shanter hat, it’s okay to call it that. If the item in question is, say, a branded thing, you can get a little more flexible. Say your character has a magical item that works just like a liquid Band-aid. But you can’t call it that because Band-aid is a brand and they don’t have adhesive bandages in the story for you to compare it to. In cases like this, it’s best to name the item yourself and define it for the audience. “’Hold still,’ Theresa demanded, pouring the syrupy potion over the wound. Within a few minutes, the liquid solidified, protecting the large scrape from the outside world and dulling the pain. ‘Wow,’ Sir Hugh said, running his hand over the area. ‘What was that?’ ‘Elvish suture,’ Theresa explained. ‘Made of pine sap, some medicinal herbs, and a little alchemy. Don’t strain too hard and it should hold until we can get you to a proper doctor.’” Here, you’ve established what the thing is, what it does, and gave off the general vibe of a liquid bandage without actually using the words. This technique is best used for things that are modified from things that exist in our world. Another option when you’re borrowing from our world is to use a generic term or modify a generic term to your advantage. Going back to the Band-Aid example, let’s say your world DOES have Band-Aids, but since it’s not Earth, you want to call it something else. You can give it a completely foreign name and appearance such as “Verdant’s Dressings” and describe it as “a green, leaf-shaped fabric bandage that uses an adhesive to bind gauze to an open wound,” or you can use a generic term and just call it an “adhesive bandage” depending on how different you want it to be from something in our world the more unique your name for it is, the more it seems to belong to your world and not ours, but this can have the disadvantage of confusing or alienating your audience. When something is entirely your own invention, huzzah! Name it yourself and have fun with it! A great way to make it familiar and memorable to your readers is to name it based on mythology or with Greek/Germanic/Latin base words. If there’s a sleeping potion in your world, you can name it Morph’s Tears to associate it with Greek God Morpheus or you can call it Somnetic Vapors to associate it with somnum, Latin for sleep. If you’re drawing from the mythology of other cultures, try using words from that culture’s language for your naming conventions. Beware of what you decide to borrow from and how you decide to use terms as some mythical creatures are sacred to some cultures, some gods and monsters are sacred to some closed religions, and some foreign words have had different historical meanings than their modern ones. See also: When is it Okay to Borrow This?

How Modern is too Modern for the Medieval? General Rules and How to Break Them: When you write a fantasy work, chances are it’s a high-fantasy novel. High Fantasy often sticks with a world that is medieval or at least pre-modern. While these rules can be applied to other time periods or genres like steampunk, I’m most familiar with high fantasy and medieval time periods so I will use that for most of this advice. Generally a lot of what we think of as “normal” has only been around for 200-500 years and everything earlier than that is considered ancient by our standards. However, some things might surprise you. This is why research is always important. Things like tea, bathrooms, fireworks, and aqueducts are much older than you may think at first and some things a full set of silverware or belts and buttons are more recent than you think. When researching, always be sure to search “the history of X” and not just “when was X invented?” Often times “invented” means patented and that will yield much more recent results. Bagged tea was invented in 1908, but tea as a beverage goes way father back in history (around year 200 BC.) Furthermore, loose leaf tea is a modern invention and wasn’t purchased or sold that way until around the late 1800s. Tea was usually sold in a brick and you could buy a tea cake or an entire sheet of them at the market to grate down to a loose leaf brew at home. Sugar, similarly wasn’t the white granulated stuff we have today. Sugar was sold as a damn, cone-shaped loaf. While the layperson may not be troubled by your medieval queens and kings sipping a loose leaf tea, a more “educated” reader might. The more familiar a reader is with the time period you’re basing your work around, the more your anachronisms will stick out. If magic is present in your work, you have more flexibility, but you should generally try to stick to a period of 100-200 years. The bigger your window of time, the more you run into the chance of some things seeming inaccurate. Anachronisms are definitely not something to break your brain over trying to avoid them, but if you want, say, steam-power in your book when everything else stays more true to the medieval period, you do want to try to justify the anachronism within the narrative. As previously stated, magic existing in your world makes this much easier to do. If your world has magic, then faster-than-light communication may be possible with, say, a telepathy spell or a scrying spell. This may eliminate the need for carrier pigeons and may even hasten the equivalent of something similar to a magical computer or a magical internet or telephone service. Keep in mind that this might also hinder technological development, making your world seem to be set further back in time than it actually is. If, say, your world has magic that allows a kind of hammerspace where you can store anything, and it’s widely accessible, then wagons might not exist in your world. Who needs them when you can shove everything you own in a cheap bag and take it with you on your horse? For that matter, if transporting everything is that simple, your world might not even have many towns or hubs because more groups can afford to be nomadic. Maybe agriculture doesn’t even exist, and your main character’s village is a group of nomads that live like cowboys and just follow their herds, eating their meat and supplementing it with whatever vegetables they find on the way, rather than building farms. Research technology you want to exist in your world, narrow down an analogous time frame in our world where that technology exists, keep most of your technology to things that exist to within a 100-200 year window of your desired time period. When you have anachronisms, justify their existence within the narrative by explaining why the invention of that technology was important. Think about how the anachronisms of your world shape it and how the magic in your world, if any, would shape what anachronisms exist. Why Everyone Probably Shouldn’t Speak the Same Language: While it is true that even in the medieval period, there were plenty of people and plenty of nations that spoke English, not every country did. Similarly, while most people in your fantasy world might be able to get away with speaking a common tongue, it’s important to think about a few things. The higher caste your characters are from, the better able they should be to communicate with almost anyone as, historically, they would have had schooling where they learned from tutors how to speak with others for diplomatic purposes. Keep in mind that this is especially true for allies but also true for enemies. You cannot negotiate peace treaties between humans and elves if the elves only speak elvish and the humans only speak their own language, after all and you cannot make war time demands if your enemy doesn’t know what you want. Vice versa, if your main character is a pauper, unless their relatives are from different walks of life, your character might only speak the language of the area they grew up in or some sort of pigeon language between their nation and its nearest neighbor. Dialects within regions also happen. Canadian French is not the same as the French they speak in France, after all. Remember that the language barrier increases if there’s a large body of water or a mountain range dividing two nations. The harder it is for them to trade with each other by geography, the harder it will be for them to communicate. While this can be mitigated somewhat by the use of magic (telepathy where communication isn’t verbal, or by the use of some magical translation spell) or by the existence of a long-lived tribe (language develops fast, but it’s harder to have a tower of Babel effect where language is highly diverse when there’s a 1000 year old dwarf in your village that speaks the old tongue and everyone else around them does too because good luck getting the old goat to learn the new slang) if your world doesn’t have magic or an ancient race where people regularly live to be very old, you can benefit from the use of Conlangs. Conlangs: Short for “Constructed Language,” a conlang is basically a made up language to add a diverse feel to your book. If your characters are interacting with aliens, it would be weird for the aliens to come down and speak perfect English without the use of some translation technology. Similarly, if your world doesn’t have magic, it’s very strange if people can all understand each other if they haven’t all been colonized by the same powerful empire or if they don’t all live near each other. And Island nation that’s hard to get to is probably not going to speak the same language that they do on the mainland thousands of miles away, and if they do, it’s going to be a weird dialect that no one on the mainland understands anymore if the isolated island doesn’t somehow keep in regular contact. This is when conlangs are useful. You don’t have to go full Tolkien and have a complete, speakable elvish language. But the closer you get to that, the more real the world seems. You don’t have to be an expert linguist to do this, but if you are one or know one, creating a conlang is easier. Start by figuring out what language you want to base it on. It’s much easier to construct a language based on one that already exists. Because English is one of the most commonly spoken languages in the world (both as a first and as a second language) English is a good base language, especially if you intend to market your book to an English-speaking audience. If your conlang doesn’t appear often, you can get away with coming up with only a few words as they’re needed. But if your character is best friends with someone who immigrated from another nation, you want your conlang to be borderline translatable if not fully translatable. Lingo Jam is a great resource for creating a conlang as you can add in words and their translations to create a translator to help your readers. Lingo Jam also provides a list of the most common words used in English to help you get started with a rough idea of what words you might need to translate. Keep in mind root words, regular and irregular verbs for conjugations, and word-order. Idioms unique to your conlang also add to authenticity, and the more important something is to a culture, the more likely their language would reflect that. If your character comes from a snowy climate, maybe they have more words for snow than they do for grass. Or maybe they have fewer. Or maybe they have specific words for different thicknesses because knowing the thickness of ice is important to their survival. If there’s a special magical item that comes only from that characters country, chances are that their word for it is unique, or that other cultures and nations borrow the word for that thing from that conlang. Consider also the interplay between gender, climate, religion, and other aspects of culture and how that reflects on your language. If your character’s culture originated in a desert where water is scarce and they’re highly religious, chances are that words for water and divinity will have some link or be seen together often. If your character lives in a matriarchal society, perhaps their word for doctor is “medicine woman” the same way English has gendered terms like “fireman.” Maybe your magical race of tree people doesn’t differentiate between male and their word for “person” isn’t gendered at all. Or maybe they have several gendered words that refer to tree species more than anything about our concept of gender and they apply these “tree genders” to human populations based on height and hair color. As a final note, remember that conlangs aren’t necessary, and if this kind of thing hurts your head, you can just use Esperanto or skip it all together. There are plenty of successful fantasy novels out there that don’t use conlangs. If you want a fun way to add depth to a vast fantasy world, do consider the conlang, but it’s by no means necessary to have one and it’s not world-breaking to not have one. “When is it Okay to Borrow This?” and Other Questions About Taking Inspiration from Different Cultures: I’m basing most of my information off this post, and it sadly seems to display in improper order, but it’s worth the read. Basically if something is specific to a culture or religion (this is why researching is important) it’s probably not okay to borrow from it unless you know what you’re doing. Having a sensitivity reader is good for this, but if you don’t have one or can’t find one, consider reaching out to someone you know who is familiar with the culture to ask if it’s okay. If something is a food, item of clothing, or a technology that has spread across the world, chances are it’s okay to use that. Rice is a common staple food, for example, so if your world or your character has a specific type of riceball or onigiri, it’s usually okay to call it a rice ball, call it onigiri, or describe it as such. I do have some caveats for that later. A kimono, likewise, is considered everyday clothes, if a bit old-fashioned, and kimono are often given as gifts if you stay with a family in Japan. If you base an item of clothing off a kimono in your story, that should be fine. A good rule of thumb is: If you can buy it in a gift shop in the country you’re borrowing it from, or if it’s widely sold across the world by the people who created it, it’s probably okay to use in your story. The Caveat: Keep in mind, when you borrow things, that stereotypes exist, and if you’re using it because of a stereotype, even a positive stereotype, you need to reconsider. Let’s say one of your fantasy races is coded as “Asian” (as non-specific and vague as that is) it’s obviously bad to describe them as having yellow skin, eating “gross” and “weird” foods, having “slit” eyes and a number of other things. But what’s less obvious are positive stereotypes. If this fantasy race of yours that’s coded after some Asian group are broadly characterized as “being smarter than everyone around” that’s ALSO a stereotype. While it’s generally the case that “Asian people are smarter” here in the USA, it’s important to note that a big reason behind that is that most people immigrating from Asian countries like China, Japan, and Korea are wealthy. They can afford to take a risk and move to the USA, so they do. And because they are wealthier, they can afford to pay for better education, tutors, and private lessons for their children. And when they do, the children tend to score better on tests which makes it seem like they’re smarter. Remember that a lot of things are highly correlated with wealth and challenge and scrutinize why you might want to pick a certain trait for a certain character. Pay Special Attention to Anything You Want to Characterize Negatively: If your character doesn’t like sushi, is it just because she doesn’t like fish? Or is it because she doesn’t like raw fish? If you can’t think of a reason why, or if the answer is “she doesn’t like it because it’s different from what she’d normally eat.” think about the reason YOU think that way. Not everyone has to like sushi, but if your character hates it just because she’s never had it before and it’s strange to her, unless your character is MEANT to be inexperienced, this makes her come off as a bit xenophobic. This kind of thing exists in a grey area, so again, this doesn’t mean your character is bad if they don’t like sushi, it’s just something to consider. A more clear-cut case is this. You describe a character as ugly, with a big, long, hooked nose. Why? Chances are you picked this up from an old cartoon, and that old cartoon picked it up from somewhere else. While not intrinsically anti-semitic the “ugly, long, hooked nose” has been a long-standing anti-semitic caricature. That’s not to say an ugly character can never have a long, hooked nose, but you have to be extremely careful with what other traits they have, because that anti-semitic caricature goes hand in hand with many other negative stereotypes and you may not even realize they’re stereotypes you hold. Again, this is why a sensitivity reader is so very important. Because nowadays, representation is important and it matters, and it’s great if you want to write about lots of different people and cultures and borrow from them, but it’s also very easy to be swayed by stereotypes and biases you didn’t even know you had and accidentally come off as racist, sexist, homophobic, or xenophobic in the process. Don’t let the fear of falling victim to your own implicit biases stop you from trying to be diverse, but do let it give you pause. If you’re uncertain of the history of something, PLEASE research it and PLEASE consult as many people from that culture as possible. Remember: some things are sacred. Just because something is old doesn’t mean it’s safe, either. Some people still worship the Greek Gods. Some people still practice paganism.  So When is it Okay to Borrow This Thing?: Again, if it’s something you can buy from the people who’s culture it belongs to, it’s generally okay to assume that it’s a part of their culture they want to share. Clothing, food, and technology are usually safe bets, especially if you intend to talk about them in a positive light. (Beware of “Exoticising” things too much though.) If something is a part of a culture you belong to, then that’s also usually a safe bet of something you can riff off of without being insensitive. But beware. What’s good representation for you, might be bad representation to someone else. Your idea of Christmas, might be blasphemous to someone else, hence why it’s especially important to tread lightly with religions. “Exoticising”: Exoticising can be described as a subtle form of racism in which you worship, eroticize, romanticize, or fantasize a certain element of a culture, race, or religion to which you do not belong. This is often seen when describing a black woman as a “mocha-colored goddess” but can also be seen when describing he food, customs, or language of a particular group. “Weeaboos” are often guilty of exoticising Japanese culture, and food journalists are especially bad about this when they try to describe foreign foods by describing them in ill-fitting “terms that an American would understand.” It’s known as exoticising because it serves one of two purposes. It’s either used to make the foreign or “exotic” more palatable to an audience less receptive to it or by making something foreign even MORE foreign and mysterious, enhancing it’s “exotic” appeal. You may be exoticising a food if you describe it in a way that resembles the foods described in this post. If you describe a person using food terms or describe a religion as cultish or mysterious, you may be exoticising it. Sensitivity Readers: A sensitivity reader is a type of beta reader or editor that specifically looks for elements in your book that may be problematic. While no single sensitivity reader can possibly catch every single thing that might potentially be offensive, if you have concerns about your work, it might be a good idea to run your manuscript by one of these readers first. They will give you suggestions on what to improve or remove. Just like any beta reader, you do NOT have to take the advice they give or implement the changes they suggest, but they can be helpful if you’ve ever been told your work is “problematic.” Again, remember that what’s empowering for one person is denigrating to another, and your book will never satisfy EVERYBODY. Think about what group you’re trying to write for, and implement edits based on what you think would appeal most to that group. Magic systems: Ever important for people writing fantasy is the magic system. “Harry Potter” had the “wand as a focus” and “incantation as power” set-up, “The Elder Scrolls” series has potions, books, skills, and words of power, covering a whole slew of magical rules. When designing a magic system, you need to decide how it works, and that requires answering some questions. “What can magic do, what can it not do, what does it cost, who can learn it, how is it learned and how do you do it?” What Magic Can Do?: Can magic help you light a fire? Move a mountain? Raise the dead? Cool! Write down some of the things magic can do in your project bible or somewhere that you’ll remember to look so you can reference the rules of magic later. Think of what purpose magic has in your story. Is it a tool your protagonist needs to overcome obstacles? Is it an oppressive force that needs to be banned? Consider the role magic plays when deciding what magic can do and why that’s empowering or oppressive. And remember, it’s totally okay if you just want magic to exist in your world because it’s cool! Just remember that the other aspects of magic are that much more important now, so that the magic in your world doesn’t seem out of place. Next... What Can’t Magic Do?: Remember that limitations make the world more realistic and establish boundaries. If your magic can do anything, your characters are all gods, and relative power levels are meaningless. That can be boring and no one will know what to expect. Will a new obstacle cause the main character to struggle? Is their new opponent a threat? Limitations are necessary for your readers to actually see characters grow as they push boundaries and magic is no different. If magic can help you create fire, can it put the fire out? Does it need a source of fire to bend or can the fire be spontaneously generated? If you can move a mountain, does the size of the mountain matter? Does a larger mountain require more mages to move it? (Remember that limitations like this don’t have to be well known in your world. Consider “Avatar: The Last Airbender.” Metal bending was thought to be impossible even for experienced earth benders. And then Toph came along and blew that out of the water and bent metal because Toph is awesome like that. So consider the difference between hard limits [things no one can do] and soft limits [things that are hard to do, require a loophole, or are an obstacle for your special protagonist to obliterate.] One hard limit I see a lot is that magic cannot raise the dead/make you immortal because if you can raise the dead or make yourself immortal, the stakes are drastically lower for your characters unless your universe has a “fate worse than death” clause in it somewhere. If magic can raise the dead, they come back “wrong” or imperfect or it costs so much energy to do it’s not worth trying. If magic can make you immortal there’s usually a cost associated. Even if you elect not to use any hard limits at all, consider what magic costs. What Does Magic Cost?: Is it “free” but you have to know how to do it or else risk consequences and misfires like in “Harry Potter?” Does it require energy like spell slots in “Dungeons and Dragons” or mana like in most RPG video games and when you use up all that energy you have to rest or risk killing yourself with it? Going back to raising the dead and immortality, “Full Metal Alchemist” deals with the cost pretty well. You can’t raise people from the dead because God/the Truth won’t let you, but you can try. And you will fail. And it will cost you part of your body if not your life. And whatever you do create is not what you wanted, not who you wanted. You can make a Philosopher's Stone that makes you immortal and lets you bypass other costs for alchemy. Except it requires you to kill countless people and, if I remember correctly, using alchemy uses up the souls in the Philosopher's Stone instead of materials. So you can be immortal. You just have to be a moral monster. FMA also does cost with “normal” alchemy in an interesting way. It requires “equivalent exchange,” meaning if you want to alchemically make yourself a bunch of little bird-shaped wooden paperweights, you need to have the wood to do it and you have to know the alchemical formula to make an alchemy circle to do it. It’s also stated in at least one version of the anime that the energy to perform alchemy comes from souls in a parallel world so, like, honestly, alchemy is scary as hell and the cost usually involves human life. Cost is also a good way of creating “power levels.” The strongest mage might be the one that practices more, sure. But if magic is innate and everyone can do it, what separates one educated mage from another educated mage? Cost. Whoever is willing to sacrifice more will win. This also stops your character from relying on magic for everything. If magic has a relatively low cost, we should expect things like we see in “Harry Potter.” Things never really developed much beyond the medieval because magic solved most problems so there was no need for more technology. “Why have a TV? We have magic photographs and stuff! Airplanes? Nah, we have portkeys and floo powder and magic.” If magic has a high cost, you would probably see a lot of technical development alongside magic. Why do energy-sapping magic to light a fire to make your tea when you can just invent an electric kettle to boil water for you? Think about how the cost will limit your character and shape their world. Who Can Learn Magic and How?: Is it something everyone has the potential for? If so, is everyone a mage/witch/wizard? If not, what stops people with the innate ability from performing magic? (See again: cost.) If it’s not innate, or only innate to some people, what causes people to be attuned to magic? Is it something only elves can do? If it’s something you’re born into, how did it first appear and how is it heritable? Does it spring up at random in populations with a certain level of genetic heritability  i.e. Mudbloods and squibs a la “Harry Potter?” Is it passed down like an heirloom? Is it tied to access to a font/source of magic? How did the first mage learn to use magic? Experimenting? Watching another magical creature do it? Gifted the knowledge by a supreme being? How do new generations learn it? Apprenticing to a master sorcerer? From books? From parents? By practicing? From a school of magic? Are certain people limited to certain types of magic like the benders in “Avatar: The Last Air Bender?” How is Magic Done?: Do you need to know magic words? Arcane symbols? Do you need a focus or a medium like a wand or crystal? Is magic done primarily through potions, written hexes, or hand gestures? If the cost is a material, is it a special material like the tooth of a dragon or the remains of a dead fairy? If the magic is contained in a material like a scroll or a crystal, how do you cast the spell? Combining different things within and between categories helps you create a believable and controlled magic system that isn’t overpowered and creates a consistent feel for magic that your readers will pick up on. Do it right and you’ll create a world where your readers are more-or-less aware of who’s a stronger magic user than whom and why, while still leaving them room to be surprised if your protagonist is capable of breaking some of the rules of magic. Do it right and your readers will be confident in your characters’ abilities but will still be concerned when your characters go up against an opponent with either obviously more experience/power or an unknown/new power. Romance and Fluffy Stuff: Some general rules for romance writing. 

Feel the Burn: Decide how slow you want it to burn, first and foremost. If your characters are already an established couple, that romance is already lit. You are on fire and your job is to keep feeding it. However, most romance stories start with the characters as strangers or friends and it’s your job to build up the relationship so that the chemistry and synergy are apparent and the romance develops naturally. Now, when I write romance, I write a burn so slow that you get 10 chapters in and the leads haven’t even met each other yet. Unless the slowest of slow burns is absolutely your shtick, you probably don’t want to do that, but your characters also probably shouldn’t be kissing in the first 2 chapters unless they’re already an established couple. Something like Disney’s Animated “Beauty and the Beast '' is about average in terms of how slow the burn is. They’re catching feels ⅓ or ½ into the movie and they’re really bonding and genuinely romancing right before the climax. A slower burn might have you wait until ⅔ of the way for the first inklings of “will they/won’t they?” TV shows are notorious for this and almost never have the main couple pair up until the end of the series, but they usually still have chemistry showing up in season one. “Miraculous Ladybug” is notorious for doing this but that’s partly because the episodes aren’t necessarily chronological, and the big appeal is the romance potential between the leads which is why the writers don’t want to make them a couple until the very last moment or else they risk losing viewers who are only in it for the romantic tension. I personally think that’s cowardly, but it’s a tried and true method for a TV series. ABC’s “Castle” didn’t have the main couple together until Season 5 out of 8 seasons and they only got married in Season 7. Just remember if you seal the deal on the romance too soon, you need an exciting plot to follow it with the romantic partners working together in order for the story to remain interesting after the “will they/won’t they?” tension is resolved or else the book after that will just be boring. But if you wait too long to get to the juicy bits, the reader might get frustrated, the actual romantic parts will feel rushed by comparison, or if you flesh out the aftermath, your book will be 500,000 words long and let’s face it, most people don’t have the patience for that (that’s 5-10 times the industry standard length, by the way.) Decide how slow you want the burn to go and then pace the story accordingly. A faster paced book will want to see the characters getting along pretty early on if not right away, and a slower paced book leaves more room for tension, enemies-to-friends-to-lovers stuff, or lots of fluffy bits.  Believable Romance or “A Recipe for Good Smooches”: The next thing you have to worry about in romance is making it believable. Chemistry, synergy, and affection are your 3 big ingredients. If your characters don’t have all of this, the relationship is going to seem stale or fake. Are your characters attracted to one another? Do they get along? That’s chemistry. If your characters absolutely hate each other but suddenly start kissing, there are only 3 options, it’s either bad writing, or they’re hate-kissing/fake kissing. In a believable romance, you CAN have hate-kissing and/or fake kissing, but if you want the chemistry to feel real, they shouldn’t hate everything about each other and should like more than half (on average) of their partner’s personality quirks, facial features, hobbies etc. If your characters have nothing in common/no chemistry/no shared interests it will be REALLY hard to make your readers buy that their affection for each other is sincere. Next is Synergy. How well do the characters work together? If they fight side-by-side are they in sync? Can they predict their partners needs more often than not? If they played the Newlywed’s Game and had to answer trivia about each other, would they score a lot of points? The more your characters know about each other and the better they’re able to work with each other, the more believable their chemistry is. Finally we have affection. How warm are your characters toward each other. How easily do they resolve fights? How often do they give gifts, cuddle, or spend time together. The more affectionate they are, the more it gives credence to their synergy. You don’t have to show affection, chemistry, or synergy in equal parts or all at the same time, but remember that these aspects of the romance are part of a three-legged stool. If you remove any one of the legs completely, the stool will have a very hard time staying up, and the closer they are to the same length, the more stable the stool. A couple with very little chemistry and synergy but is VERY affectionate just seems weird, like inexperienced kids playing at romance rather than a real romance. An excess of chemistry with nothing else makes the pair seem like friends with benefits more than a romantic pairing. And synergy without the other two aspects leans way more deeply into the “best friends” category than the “we’re dating/married” category.  Like certain Disney Princesses, missing synergy makes the relationship look more like mutual pining at best or a one-sided romance at worst. Missing out on chemistry, again, makes the bond more familial like found-family or best friends. And missing affection can make it seem either like a broken marriage that’s only staying together for the kids or the comfort, or it makes the couple seem like they’re not really all that committed to each other. The closer you are to having the three ingredients in balance, the closer you are to a believable and idealistic romance. This and more in this post. The Fluffy Bits: Even if the romance isn’t a primary part of your story, the people who like romance and want to see it in your story are going to hate you if you just tell them everything straight. “Henry and Jess went out on a date and had a lot of fun. They had a nice dinner, watched a movie, and slept together at the end of the night,” is WAY boring. The romantic parts don’t have to be 10 page long pining scenes, or describe the dinner date in lucid, uninterrupted detail from start to finish. But you should let the readers see the juicy bits in real time, or at least without glossing over them. “Henry and Jess met up at eight and went to the book shop where they first met to pick up the new release of their favorite book series before heading off to dinner. They read each other chapters from the book while waiting to be seated, and talked about work while waiting for their meal. Henry offered sympathy when Jess expressed her upset that she wasn’t getting along with a new coworker in her department. After the meal, they went to see a screening of Jurassic Park at the old movie theater. Henry remarked how much he loved it the same as he had when he was a boy and Jess admitted that she never appreciated the film as much before she met Henry. They stopped for ice cream on the way home before Jess spent the night at Henry’s. She fell asleep beside him, drifting off somewhere around page 23 of their new book.” That’s not nearly enough detail for some people but it’s WAY better than the first example. The more heavily romance features in your story, the more time should be spent detailing these events and the closer to real time the descriptions should be. We don’t need a frame-by-frame of every second of their night together, but the more detail you give, the more it’s going to engross the readers. Opposites Attract: While some IRL couples can get away with having completely different political ideologies, no shared interests, and nothing in common, most people aren’t like that and it’s VERY hard to pull off in fiction. While the two romantic leads should NOT be carbon copies of each other, they also shouldn’t be complete opposites. Complementary opposites should be about as far into opposites territory as you go and “cut from the same cloth by a different tailor” is about as far as you should go in the other direction. Complementary Opposites: If your characters are more different than alike, their similarities need to be rock solid when it comes to synergy and their differences shouldn’t always be polar opposites but often complementary. While you can get away with “He’s an introvert and she’s an extrovert” and “She plays concert piano but he can’t even carry a tune” it’s a lot harder to get away with “She wants to party all day, every day, and never spend a quiet night at home, and he just wants to read in bed for 6 hours a day” or “She wants every waking moment to be filled with jazz music and he absolutely hates jazz and he would erase it from existence if he could.” If she’s messy and he’s tidy, she can never be TOO messy, or else he’d realistically end up resenting her for never putting anything away and occupying every flat surface in the house to the point where he can’t work on anything without having to shove all her things off to a corner. If she’s a vegan, it’s going to be very frustrating if he’s allergic to 90% of all green foods. If you have hard/distinct differences between the two, there should be more things they agree upon to make up for it. If she’s a big family gal and he’s a lone wolf, they may choose to compromise and have 2 kids instead of 8 like she wants and 1 like he wants, but the compromise is believable because they both love going running in the evening together and they both flip their lids over the same TV show. The better your chemistry, synergy, and affection, the bigger the differences you can get away with. Same Cloth, Different Tailor: While good friends usually agree on most things, just as good spouses would, people are not hive-minds and it’s VERY rare for people to agree on everything. Even if they do agree, their reasons for agreeing may be different. For example, maybe both your characters believe murder is bad no matter what. But one character comes from the perspective that murder is bad because all life is precious and no one should have the right to take the life from someone else so even even killing in self-defense is bad. The other character may believe that murder and killing are distinct categories and believes that it’s okay to kill in self-defense because letting someone kill you is worse than killing someone in self-defense because if you die, the killer might go on to kill more people. Maybe both characters like to eat vanilla ice cream, but one of them likes it because they’re just really picky and don’t like any other flavors but the other likes vanilla because you can add a lot of toppings without it tasting bad. When characters are cut from the same cloth, it’s important to remember that they not be too codependent. They should have other interests beyond shared interests and should be comfortable being alone. Insurmountable Differences: Sometimes things that do happen in real life aren’t believable in fiction. If your characters are too different in certain regards, it’s VERY hard to believe they have a genuine romance. If your characters are on the polar opposite side of the aisle on these big issues, it’s not going to be believable in most cases. These insurmountable differences that make suspending disbelief harder (but not impossible) are: Polar opposite political beliefs. If one of your characters believes trans women are women and the other believes trans people should all die, they’re PROBABLY not going to make a very believable couple. Religion. If one of your characters is a devout Christian who believes all non-Christians are going to hell and the other is an atheist who thinks all religion is superstition and baloney, it’s way harder to believe they’re going to get along without constantly fighting over that. Cleanliness: If one character lives in a literal pigsty hoarder nest and the other is so anal retentive about dust that they take 10 showers every day and their blood boils if something doesn’t smell “right,” they are absolutely going to fight and make each other miserable. Core personality traits. If your characters are polar opposites when it comes to level of openness, introversion/extroversion, or neuroticism, they probably won’t get along. Morals. If your characters have completely different moral compasses,  it’s very hard to make that work. Dependence. If one character is totally codependent and the other is completely independent, either one of them is going to be exploited or one of them is going to feel suffocated. Keep in mind this doesn’t mean the characters can never differ on these subjects, but if the differences are, as I said, polar opposite, there’s very little chance readers will believe the couple gets along, no matter how much chemistry, synergy, and affection you add in. The smaller you make differences in these categories, the more believable your couple will be. Friendships as a Bedrock for Romance: If your characters would not be best friends and you’re going for romance and not just steamy bedroom scenes, then your couple will be very hard to believe as a romantic pairing. Friendship is an ideal stepping stone between strangers and lovers, and often a necessary one. That’s not to say your characters have to start as friends. But if your characters couldn’t even imagine being friends with their intended partner, being in a romance also isn’t a likely path for their relationship.

Some Final, General Notes: A section dedicated to things I though up at the last minute or didn’t fit anywhere else. “Holy Shit! Two Cakes!” and Combating Impostor Syndrome: Sometimes you feel like, even when people like your story, that your work is nothing special, that other people are better than you, that you don’t deserve praise because your story was inspired by other things. In cases where you feel like an impostor, it’s important to remember what your work looks like from outside sources. In general, people tend to like “more of the same” and that’s why so many successful novels and movies are inspired by other sources. The Lion King didn’t set out to be Hamlet/Amleth, but it’s clearly working off the same bone structure. 90% of mystery shows take direct inspiration from Sherlock Holmes. Most high fantasy novels take inspiration from Tolkien. The Sistine Chapel is literally fanart of the Bible and Dante’s Divine Comedy (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso) are literally Bible fan-fiction where Dante self-inserts and hangs out with his faves like Virgil while writing in all the people he hated getting punished in hell. Most if not all of Disney’s properties are adapted from fairy tales that they didn’t write themselves. When you find yourself thinking: ”Nothing I write is unique,” remember that. There is nothing new under the sun, but even if your story has been told before, no one has ever told it like you will tell it. And when you find yourself thinking: “Nothing I write will ever be as good as what I was inspired by.” Remember: “Two Cakes.” If you work your butt off to make a cake to bring to a party and someone else brings a cake that looks way better, remember that most people at the party are not going to think “Ugh, TWO cakes? No one wants two cakes! Eat the pretty one and throw out the shitty one!” No. Most people are going to think “HOLY SHIT! TWO CAKES! THAT’S AWESOME! NOW WE HAVE ENOUGH CAKE FOR PEOPLE TO HAVE SECONDS!” Sure, people might eat the prettier cake first. But maybe yours has cherries and the other one doesn’t and cherries are someone’s absolute favorite! Or maybe your cake isn’t as pretty but it’s gluten-free and there’s someone in the crowd with Celiac who’s SO thankful you brought a cake that they can eat. And even if your cakes are the exact same? And everyone goes to the pretty cake first? The hungry people will come back for your cake after. And they’ll be happy for a second slice. “But Fan-Fiction is Bad!”: No. Fan-fiction is how we’ve been telling stories for hundreds of years. The story of King Arthur that we have today is literally a fanfic of a fanfic of a fanfic of a fanfic. The original King Arthur story didn’t even have other knights or a round table or Merlin. Disney literally makes its money by doing fanfiction of public domain stories. Niel Gaiman wrote HP Lovecraft and Sherlock Holmes fanfic and published it as an original work and won a Hugo award for it. The comic book industry is literally built off taking characters someone else made and making them do different things or making them do the same thing in a different way. Fanfiction is literally how stories are told. Any original idea you have is probably inspired by something that happened to you or something you adored as a kid and forgot about. Badly written fanfiction is bad because it’s badly written, not because it’s fanfic. “No one wants to read someone’s work if it’s not original!” Nah, man. There are people that have seen every Batman movie ever made, read every comic that even remotely mentioned Batman, and own anything with Batman’s symbol on it. King Arthur and his knights are referenced in media constantly. Neon Genesis Evangelion had and still has merchandise out the ass, reboots, spin-offs, and games made about it. Harry Potter inspired copycats around the world. There’s published work out there, right now, called “50 Shades of Grey” which is erotic “Twilight” fan-fiction re-branded to something original and it took the freaking world by storm, whether it deserved the fame it got or not. Fan-fiction is just a way some people tell stories and there’s no shame in that. “But Someone Said X Trope Was Bad!”: Tropes and archetypes are neither bad nor good. They are tools and building blocks. Learning how to use them, play with them, or subvert them in a way that works for your story is the difference between a “good” trope and a “bad” one. Do you like it when the grumpy person and the soft sweet person fall in love? That’s a trope. Do you like it when the hero has a snappy one-liner? Trope. Do you like heroes that are absolute dumbasses with hearts of gold? Trope. Do you like it when the villains are flashy and goofy? Trope. If you’ve seen it more than once, chances are it’s a trope. And there’s no shame in using a trope or an archetype.  Know the Answers to the Questions You Want Your Readers to be Asking: Does one of your characters die at the end? Do you want your readers to ask themselves “Oh my God? Did X just die?” Suspense is important to stories, and getting your readers to ask questions is part of building suspense. But even if you never intend to reveal the answers, you should still know the answers to the questions you want your readers to ask. “Was the hero the bad guy all along?” Even if you never confirm one way or the other, YOU personally should know the answer. This is useful not only for sequel baiting, but it also helps you tell a more consistent narrative with a one-shot story. Knowing the answers helps you be deliberate with what you choose to reveal, and whether what you reveal gets the reader closer to the answer, or muddies the waters more and more. That’s All Folks: Again, this is just stuff I picked up. Only take the advice that you want to take or that you think will help you. It’s your book and you have complete control over it. Hopefully, this has been helpful. Now get out there and write! I may add more information as I learn more because I’m always learning and growing.

#writing tips #refs #writing refs #long post #how to write

[ayearofpike]

Strange Girl

Simon Pulse, 2015 413 pages, 19 chapters + epilogue ISBN 978-1-4814-5058-4 LOC: PZ7.P626St 2015 OCLC: 936552329 Released November 17, 2015 (per B&N)

There’s a new girl in school, and something about her is unbelievably interesting to Fred Allen. Maybe it’s the way she carries herself. Maybe it’s the way she refers to herself as merely a vessel for conveying the knowledge she seems to have about our greater nature. Maybe it’s the remarkable power she commands, the way that happiness and healing ride in her wake everywhere she goes. Or maybe it’s her sweet ass. Whatever it is, she seems to connect with Fred just as quickly, elevating him to a greater happiness than he’s ever known. Of course, as with any powerful girl that people don’t understand, this happiness is fated to flee just as quickly when she pushes herself beyond what her body can handle.

Or, shorter: It’s Sati. It’s Sati set in high school with teenagers. It’s Sateen.

Part of the reason I took on this project is that I felt like my own writing was stagnating. Time was I couldn’t sit down without pumping out a thousand words of my own universe, my own characters and plots and desires and ideas. But at a certain point, I started to try to focus on bettering and refining one of my main tales, one I’d revisited off and on since sixth grade ... and I just burned out. I realized that I simply could not rework this story again, that it wasn’t ever going to be what I wanted or do what I wanted, or at least not in this fifth attempt in ten years. I couldn’t keep talking about the same thing again.

This might be indicative of why I’ve had a hard time pushing through as A Year (And A Half Now, Almost) Of Pike has approached its end point. There’s no denying that the man is a killer storyteller, and that some of his ideas and worlds were stunning and even revolutionary within the genre. But thirty years is a long time to stay in the game, especially when you’re pumping out more than three books a year for the main part of your popularity. It’s admirable that he was able to keep that up for so long without resorting to the James Patterson model of hiring someone else to write the books that have his name in large type across the top. But then, when you’ve only got one brain working on all these extensive ideas and under these onerous deadlines, you’re invariably going to start to repeat yourself. 

Almost everything Pike wrote after the start of Spooksville (I can’t even be charitable and say after his car accident) has repeated or revisited some major theme from an earlier work (mostly his own; I see you, Black Knight). And as I’ve pushed through and read every single one of his published works, I’ve started to feel that same fatigue that I had when trying to rewrite and repair something I’d spent so much time on of my own. See, this is why I can never actually be an academic despite being a composition teacher: so much of studying English is finding your niche and continuing to write about the same topic for your entire career, and I don’t think I could ever devote that much of my professional life to writing about the same thing. I just got tired of my ill-researched writing about the complete works of my favorite childhood author, for fuck’s sake. 

Still, if any book was due a revamp, Sati fits that mold. It was his first adult novel, it kinda got buried to all except his most devoted fans, and maybe it would be timely to publish a book about kindness and introspection and acceptance just as the muckrakingest American election in recent history was getting underway. But most of all, it’s still a relevant look at how we act and what we think about when we consider faith and religion and God. Considering how audiences and the book market have so drastically changed in the last thirty years, it totally makes sense that Pike might want to revisit the concept for a new generation. And honestly, I’m a victim of my own age and literacy here — nobody else who might be interested in this YA book in 2015 is reading its spiritual predecessor from 1988.

I’m mostly going to blast through the summary, because it’s been more than three weeks since I finished the book and I don’t actually want to reread it to remember specifics. Fred is a high-school musician living in Elder, South Dakota, and just like any other teenager in a small town is dreaming of escape. His parents own a hardware store and just barely maintain a rocky marriage, though all we know about that is what Fred specifically tells us. His best friend Janet, the presumptive valedictorian, has her own messy home life, but they always have each other’s backs, which is why Janet pushes Fred toward the new girl.

This is Aja, a beautiful Brazilian who relocated to South Dakota for some reason three months ago but didn’t start school until today. The teacher in the class they share is unreasonably mean to her for apparently no reason, but it doesn’t put Fred off buying her lunch and trying to learn more about her. He’s unsuccessful, largely, but she does learn about him and his band and their work before she takes off. They’re doing a gig at a nearby Air Force bar on the weekend, and everyone knows Fred is the real talent and pressures him to perform a little more of his original and quieter work at the show. This here is Fred’s difficulty: he wants it, he has the talent and the drive, but he second-guesses how much people actually want to hear his voice.

Aja gets kicked out of the class they share when she’s accused of cheating on her entrance exam (what?), so Fred doesn’t see her again until after their gig. The crowd is getting raucous and angry, and the drummer doesn’t take well to that, so the evening is just starting to devolve into a brawl when Aja stands on a table and tells everyone to calm the fuck down. She also helps out one of the servicemen, who has taken a whiskey bottle to the head but now isn’t even bleeding. Weird, right? 

A local reporter sure thinks so. She posts a video of the event, with a suggestion that maybe Aja is more than she appears to be. Can she heal people? The folks at their next gig have the same question, surrounding her and generally pestering until Fred manages to pull her away. They drop her off at home, the biggest house in town, and Fred finally asks her out, sort of, by responding to her question about his unhappiness by saying she should stop accepting dates with other dudes. Like, possessive much already? But on his way to work the next day, he sees the teacher in the cemetery, near her son’s grave, and decides to talk to her about Aja. This opens a floodgate: the teacher blames herself for her son running outside and getting hit by a car, and apparently Aja knew more than she should have, which was why the teacher was so salty with her before. So what else does this girl know?

Fred goes to pick Aja up for their first official date, and ends up talking to her guardian, where he finally learns more about her past. It seems that Aja was a feral child living near a village in the Amazon, and she had a reputation as a magical healer and talent. The guardian was compelled to the village for some reason, and appointed herself the caretaker of the girl, and only uprooted them to South Dakota because Aja said they needed to go there. The guardian only has a vague idea why, but she’s pretty sure it’s related to Fred.

They go back to his house, because his parents are out, and he plays her a song almost off the top of his head that she’s inspired. Before they can start gettin’ freaky, Fred’s phone rings, and apparently his hot-headed drummer has gotten into it with some drug dealers and cops in a nearby town and is in critical condition in the hospital. So Fred and Aja go there, but when he calls the guardian’s valet (or whatever this dude is; it’s kinda muddy) to tell her what’s up, he gets pissed and freaked out and orders Fred to make Aja leave the hospital. Only he can’t find her. And when he does, she’s all dizzy, and passes out on the ride home, and when he drops her off the valet screams at him and slams the door in his face.

But the drummer wakes up, and when Fred goes to see him, he hears a story of two beings visiting him, and his realization that this was the end, only he wasn’t ready to go because it would cause too much pain. This is the only real mention of the subplot that the band’s bass player is gay and in love with the drummer, and even though the drummer is straight (I mean, I guess he could be bi, Pike doesn’t really go into details, but the point is they don’t end up together) he cares too much about his friend to just kick the bucket. So the smaller of the beings picked up on that and touched him, and then he woke up. 

There’s also a reporter there trying to talk to Fred and his best friend about the miracle that Aja performed, and they do their best to brush her off only she isn’t giving up. In fact, she’s using a YouTube channel to promote the idea that Aja is a goddess or something, with a video of the way she ended the bar brawl and testimony from a nurse in the hospital that she touched the drummer not long before he arose from life-threatening injuries. Fred agrees to meet with the reporter and actually gets more information than he gives up: namely, Aja has been curing and healing people since her days in Brazil and that she spoke with all of the villagers about her decision to leave for the US, saying there was an important reason to do so.

Before he can confront Aja and her handlers about it, her guardian dies. The valet says she’s written a letter to Fred, but he can’t seem to find it. So while we wait, let’s go on a date! Only someone in the restaurant recognizes Aja and insists she heal her daughter. And this is where we find Aja’s limitations: she can’t help this girl; her fate is to live for a short time. 

In blasting through the summary I might be glossing over Aja’s description of her connection to the cosmos and how her powers and abilities work. A lot of it ties back to the same things Pike loves to revisit when thinking about metaphysics: the oneness of Buddhist nirvana, letting go of desires and selfishness to connect to the unity of humanity, and being able to tap into superhuman powers once you’re linked. Aja calls the overarching all the “Big Person,” and her abilities come from what the Big Person tells her is necessary. She can act out of her own human desires, respond to the Little Person, but when she does it takes a toll on her health, which is what happened with the drummer. But how does someone so young get tapped into a consciousness so vast and lose her childish selfishness? We’ll get there.

Anyway, Fred goes to a band rehearsal the next day and is stopped on the way by a family who has another sick kid in the hospital, desperate for him to put them in touch with Aja. He doesn’t want to do it, knowing what he knows, but his friends accuse him of being overprotective. The best friend compares a lot of what Aja has said she does with practices she’s learned through yoga and meditation, to draw an explicit line for those in the audience who haven’t just read 94 other Pike books and didn’t look more deeply into Eastern religion because of it. And then Fred’s phone rings, and it’s the family, and they already talked to Aja and their daughter is feeling better so he doesn’t have to put himself out. What? The kid was in the hospital in another state. Aja explains that she’s not actually the vessel: the Big Person does the work, and all she’s doing is making it aware and asking the question of “can we?” 

The will reading for Aja’s guardian comes up, and in addition to splitting her (holy crap immense) wealth between Aja and the valet, she has also left instructions with her lawyer that Fred should get an audition with a record label in LA. The laywer also has the letter, which basically says that Fred can’t protect Aja from the infirm and ill, and he shouldn’t try. I guess this lady would know, right, having taken care of the girl for something like ten years. But word is getting out, more and more people are asking Aja for help, national reporters are starting to show up, Fred has a weird encounter with a spooky fortune teller in a graveyard, and he can’t help but be concerned. So he helps the valet hire a private security firm to keep these people away from Aja, which (when they follow her to school on Monday) prompts an emergency community meeting about the disruption of education by these horrible rumors.

As it turns out, this is actually a racist move by the principal, who has a reputation as an evangelical Christian and has unfairly targeted minorities (especially our drummer, who is Mexican) for years. He’s trying to get a lynch mob together without exactly saying as much. Only too bad for him a lot of people in the community (the more open-minded ones, the ones who have actually spoken to her) already support Aja, because of their own first-hand experience with her help. But enough people are screaming about Jesus that they’re just about ready to light up torches and drive Aja out of town. Until she reveals the racist principal’s big secret: he had a child with a black woman, and could never reconcile his love for them with his love for pointy white hoods or whatever, and then the kid died and he has always regretted it. And Aja holds his hands, and talks to him, and suddenly here comes the creepy fortune teller who it turns out was the mother of Racist Principal’s child, and they embrace and apologize and forgive, and the meeting is suddenly over.

Somewhere in all the Aja hullaballoo, the best friend took off to New York to live with her mother. She won’t answer Fred’s calls, she won’t respond to texts, and Aja (the last one to see her before she left) insists that she can’t be the one to reveal her confidences. So Fred goes to see her dad and try to get more info. Now this isn’t the first time Best Friend has left with the mom: the first was right after they got divorced, only she moved back a year later without any explanation. And the divorce was just as sudden and explanation-free, only the dad just accepted it. And Fred realizes, while he’s standing there in the living room and picking up hints from the dad and looking at old pictures where both women look uncomfortable: he’s a sexual predator. He touched his daughter inappropriately, because his wife and her mother was somehow loveless (leading to the girl coming back the first time) and so he partook of some fucked-up urges. Only the girl has never been able to accept that it wasn’t her fault, and in talking to Aja and exploring herself is she just getting there. So of course she needs to not LIVE with the motherfucker while she’s coming to grips.

Fortunately for Fred so he doesn’t stab a bitch, the trip to LA is nigh. Aja goes with him, and he plays his demos live, finishing with the new song he’s still writing for her. Of course that’s the song they want, and they hustle him into a recording session with an engineer to lay down a single. On the way back, Best Friend calls and asks if she can stay with him and his parents long enough to graduate high school with her friends, and as their flights land within a couple hours of each other in Sioux Falls, they plan to drive home together. Fred and Aja get there first, and he has to intimidate the dad away from the airport before his friend gets there. Only that can’t work for the whole state: he’s waiting for them to drive out of the parking lot, and attempts to run them off the road to take back his little girl.

Did I mention that it’s winter in South Dakota? The interstate is a sheet of ice, and these assholes are playing chicken at 100 mph. Of course they wreck the cars, and the kids get off with minor bumps and bruises. The dad isn’t so lucky:  his car has overturned and trapped him inside. Now the best friend is upset with him, but she’s not a sociopath and he’s still her dad, so they work to pry him out of the car before it explodes. But the way he’s bleeding and choking, he’s probably going to die anyway, so she wants Aja to heal him. And this is Fred’s great test of faith: do I argue against this and risk losing my best friend, or do I go along and risk losing my girlfriend? He finally agrees to let her listen to the Big Person.

Of course Aja collapses immediately upon laying hands on the molester. But by the time emergency response gets to the accident, he’s feeling better and Aja is fading fast. She can now finally tell Fred about her childhood, her past, which she has long avoided. It turns out that her dad was a drug dealer who stole from his bosses, and as punishment they sent three strongarms to kill the whole family. Only when they murdered Aja’s mother, her soul fled her body, leaving a gap for connection to the Big Person. The female enforcer sensed this and took the kid and ran ... and this female enforcer ended up being Racist Principal’s baby momma. No, I don’t know how it works, get your own globe. 

But now she’s given her all to Molester Dad and is on her way out. Still, her reason for coming to South Dakota was a good one: love. She knew that Fred needed her, and she knew that he would benefit from the connection she might provide to the Big Person. And even though her time was fated to be short, she feels happy that she completed her mission of love, and trusts that Fred will continue to spread the message. One last kiss, and she’s gone.

They end up at a hospital, and of course they want to do an autopsy on Aja to see why she died so suddenly and unexpectedly. The valet is firmly against it, and manages to get custody of the body and take it home, where he and Fred say one last goodbye before he lights the shit on fire. It’s a good thing she already filled out a will, that gave all her money to Fred, and that the lawyer has a copy of it!

There’s a long-ass epilogue that talks about what happened to everyone. The best friend has kids of her own and almost never talks to her dad, the two other band members founded a holistic medicine company in San Francisco and got married but to other people, and Fred himself was never able to leverage his meeting and audition into his own performing career but now writes hit songs for other people. But I guess none of them are about Aja, because now he had to write a book about it? And it’s done! The end!

See what I mean? This shit has been done before, almost beat for beat, and by the SAME AUTHOR. Now I’m not averse to reading a book again (cf. this whole goddamn project), but at least I’m going into the book knowing it is what it is. I’m not expecting to see something that is labeled a new work that actually retells a previous story that I literally just read. Maybe James Patterson can get away with that, but I don’t read his books either. 

At any rate, this post is finally done. I have this monkey off my back, and maybe now I can reflect and give some closure on the whole project. But I’ll save that for another post.

[twiststreet]

Progresso Report -- ??? 2018

It’s been a long time since I did one of these (August?)-- things in 2018 got messy.

This is an ongoing series of charts that I keep to track my slow but inevitable ascendance to a higher and more eternal plane of existence than you, a frail normal person bereft of the life force that courses through me.  As I believe Paul Atreides once explained to a Reverend Mother of the Bene Gessit order, the First Law of the Mentat is that “A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.”  Or as I believe Tommy Lee once said, in The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band, “We partied like clockwork, bro.  You could check the clock in whatever time zone we were in and figure out exactly what kind of shit we were into.”  

I started new charts in September that I’m happier with, but then everything fell apart in that last half of 2018.  Work/regular-life exhaustion-- things just got especially tiring over here; people dying-- this year had a little bodycount there for me; a lot of chart confusion this year; my New Years plans falling apart; people getting sick, me with this cold; dental stuff; housing stress (I’m trying to find a new place) which has meant a resurgence in budgeting stress. 

I guess it’s been a long year.  But I don’t want to be one of those “oohhhhh 2018 how dare you” people much either, because (a) it’s the same assholes who are like “look how busy I am” on the internet, give it a rest, and (b) they say that every single year, and it’s not like Bowie and Prince died this year.  

 I stopped cooking sometime in November, so I’m going to skip the numbers.  Which means no number analysis for 2018 trends.  But things just ... yeah, things fell apart.  Except for writing, weirdly, where I’ve filled about two notebooks, since August (which is an unusual amount for me-- I’m usually pretty slow).  I think that’s been a lot of it-- when I get in a good place writing, it’s hard to not tune out everything else, but.  

So 2019 is going to be a dust it off and start over kinda year as it turns out.  

The Weekly Section:

Cooking:  I was cooking up until November and then stopped cold around Thanksgiving-- travel always discombobulates.  Recipe-wise, though, I fell off on trying new recipes.  Chicken oyakodon one night in August or September, which didn’t turn out too good.  A lot of messing around with hot pot recipes and a veggie stew, in November-- I was kinda into the hot pot, and want to circle back to that, when I get cooking again.  I have Thai Chicken written down for October, but no idea what that means, and I circled back to that Udon-Shrimp recipe again.  

Got a little better with tacos, but not fully great there yet.  Kept trying to make my own pickled onion, but never got it right.  

Project Work: If I added up all the numbers here, this would be the bulk of my time during this span.  A lot of writing-- almost every day.  Mostly on a comic project, so one of those things that might become nothing (and maybe should be nothing-- it stinky), but.  And a lot of reading for that, old comics mostly, the classics, revisiting stuff-- it all kinda devolved into me rereading Uncanny X-Men #260 a lot, though I couldn’t tell you why. 

Trying to remember what makes something good.  That’s a bit I never figure out how to deal with-- I have a thing when I’m in the middle of a creative thing, where I just kind of throw my hands in the air and go, “I have no idea what makes something good anymore.”  Like, what do you want out of a thing??  What makes a fictional thing good?  I don’t even know when I’m in the middle of all this.  

Or I don’t know what’s good for right now-- what feels hokey or what feels hip and modern; like, you don’t want to be the guy doing ... remember when some Iron Man guys came back with a new comic in the 00′s with like ... an 80′s Iron Man comic except trying to sell that exact sound in 2005 or whatever, and were like “Hey kids”? I think about that all the time.

Looked at a lot of the big hip popular (non-DC) books -- but just from a vulture-y place, so nothing I’d feel comfortable talking about.  I don’t know-- I don’t ... I’m a little lost at the moment, I guess!  Or I know that I’m not making something good, because I’m not that guy, so wheeee.

I did like a Image book I saw, called the Outer Darkness.  I thought that was kinda funny-- kinda cute.  I’m really into LOEG: The Tempest-- I think that’s really fucking good.  I scribbled down on a sheet that I liked some old John Porcellino comic where he plays football or something with his kids.  I finally read the ending of Sin Titulo, which it turns out I didn’t have to do.

Gym: This has been a huge improvement for this year.  Except for the last couple weeks while I’ve had a cold, I’ve managed to escalate the gym more. (A) Spending more money on it, (B) involving a trainer for a period of time, and (c) having the gym walking distance from my job so I could make it part of my “At work” time in my head and not my “me doing me” time, those all I think turned out to be the trick for me-- I was angrier about not going, when money got involved, especially.  These would have good numbers...

The Monthly Section:

New Restaurants: 

I had Okonomiyaki for the first time.  (These are mostly not my photos-- I had photos but just changed phones so most of my photos got lost).  I didn’t really feel strongly about it, though-- it felt like good hangover food and I don’t drink like that much anymore, so.  

A lot of time got invested in Korean fried chicken and chicken wings.  There’s a  place in Koreatown that I got a little obsessed with (namely, the vaue meals over at Kyochon).  Tried some Japanese fried chicken, that place on Sawtelle for comparison-- no question, the Koreans won that battle.  (Though, Honey Kettle over the Koreans, but-- it’s a different flavor profile, is all, so).  

New places around where I live and work.  A new taco place.  A new “Asian small dish” place.  A vegan Thai place that ... I can’t say I recommend.  A westside Korean place, so.  In November/December, I’ve gotten really interested in the Indonesian food in my neighborhood so I’ve been eating a lot of that-- it’s like Thai but different ingredients, so a fun little adventure there.  Some crappy 3rd street Asian restaurant I didn’t even write down the name of.  

Finally went over to Guerilla Tacos.  (That’s my photo).  I really enjoyed those tacos-- Jonathan Gold had talked that place up for years when it was a truck, but I’m lazy and hadn’t gotten around to it.  (I’m not really a truck fan!).  Boy, those tacos, though... That’s the (a) Pocho Taco (ground wild boar, pine nuts, raw tomatilo chile, chipotle crema, aged cheddar & pico de gallo in a crunchy shell) and the (b) Albondigas Taco (chicken meatballs, stewd tomato salsa, castelvetrano olives, and parsley).

LA Stuff or Travel:  Travel for Thanksgiving.

A Harlan Ellison memorial at the Egyptian theater.  They played his Outer Limits and Twilight Zone episodes, and specially cut together videos of him talking or his TV work (his Gidget episode or his Burke’s Law episodes or what have you).  LQ Jones talked about making the Boy and His Dog movie; Josh Olsen talked about co-writing that Twilight Zone episode; Leonard Maltin talked about seeing The Terminator for the very first time with Harlan in the audience yelling at the screen.  It was nice, getting to be there.

I had car problems so I took some hour-or-two long walks on nights when I was relying on Lyft, just seeing what walking in LA’s like.  (It’s fine!  I mean, it’s not ideal, but it’s fine). It’s nice knowing that’s an option at the end of the day, at least.

One time at lunch, I walked by Mel Brooks having lunch with friends.  I heard him say “I love that we’re doing this” but didn’t stand there and gawk or eavesdrop like I wanted to.  But I don’t know-- I was really really excited about that.  Mel Brooks!

I went to a comedy thing for the first time in too long-- Superego and Wild Horses did a team-up improv night, where they improvised a play about middle-aged white people, getting together at a house by a lake.   I need to see more comedy-- I know that I find that very calming and I don’t know why I haven’t been, but.

Went to another Indiecade, the indie game festival-- two highlights there.  One was Flight Simulator-- a game where instead of simulating being a pilot, you simulate being a passenger on a trans-Atlantic flight, in real time.  So it’s just a simulator where you sit in a seat and wait for a flight to be over...?  That made me laugh-- I really quite enjoyed the creativity of that, and getting to speak with the guy who was making it.  (I asked a bunch of questions-- yes, your character will have a book he or she can read-- but not “Why” since that seemed extremely gauche to ask).  

The other thing was as I was walking by a room, a guy was like “hey, want to hear a guy talk about making music for the Star Wars games.”  And I was like, “Fuck it, I don’t give a shit about that, but I want to sit down and I got no place better to be, so let’s do it.  I GOT NOWHERE ELSE TO GO.”  

But it actually turned out to be a really fucking interesting discussion because... because the guy had a job that coincided exactly with where my head’s been at with the stuff I’m working on, with just thinking about comics, old comics, balancing wanting to invoke old shit while still doing new shit, and how that job of writing for comics exists for so many people, especially people not working on their own shit, who are working with pre-existing properties with expectations around what those properties and that kinda experience should deliver.  

Which is-- they hire you to be you, but they’re also hiring you to do Star Wars, to do a thing that sounds like Star Wars.  

So he talked about having to break down all the different ways that he could approach that problem-- with one way just being imitating the melodies that came before you.  But he talked about the better route being how ... He put it in terms of like language-- like the music of Star Wars has a language to it (horns, woodwinds used against bloop blarps, whatever) and it’s about figuring out how to talk in that language, but that doesn’t mean you have to say the same thing once you speak the language.  I don’t know.  

I’m not doing it justice-- I found it very interesting, and weirdly on point to what I wanted to think about, way more than I expected.

Documentaries:  I think I mentioned them all on here.  That He-Man one.  F is For Fake.  (I saw the Lego and GI Joe episodes of the Toys That Made Us).  Fighting in the Age of Loneliness, which I was really, really into-- I thought that was really cool.  City of Gold.  Some Netflix movie I’m forgetting.  That last Star Wars video by the Red Letter Media guys, if that counts.

Oh, and ... one night I had a Twitch stream on for noise, because that’s what I do now I guess (???), and the people on the Twitch stream themselves put on a documentary about Logan Paul.  It was the Shane Dawson docu-expose of Logan Paul or Aaron Paul or whoever those assholes are.  I only saw the first one of those, via Twitch stream, but holy shit, that was... whatever the fuuuuuuck that was.  I want to watch the rest of those.  Just a window into a completely other dimension of humanity.  But the window itself had a history of blackface...?  Like, you lookup the host of the documentary, the guy DOING the expose, and it’s like online people going “why he do blackface?”  What????????  What the hell is going on with Youtube???

I definitely want to go back to those.  I want to see the Darkness That’s Coming.

Movies:  I don’t know-- I saw a bunch of movies.  

Let me see:  Personal Shopper (terrific movie!), Support the Girls, Crazy Rich Asians, Buster Scruggs, that El Royale piece of shit, that Spiderman cartoon, Sometimes a Night Is For Us All (?), rewatched the original Suspiria, a shitty Netflix horror movie called Beyond the Gates, the Other Guys again, a Simple Favor, The Predator, Destination Wedding, Mayhem, half of Rampage. Saw a lot of movies with my nephews (rewatched Knight & Day and MI: Fallout, the Tooth Fairy, Jumanji 2, Castle of Cogliostro, rewatched Ant Man 2-- I know people aren’t into it but I like the wannabe-Elmore-Leonard plotting, Jackie Chan’s Skiptrace, Daddy’s Home 2 (no!), School of Rock). 

I rewatched Buckaroo Banzai over Thanksgiving after people went to sleep and I didn’t have anything to do.  I fucking hated that movie as a kid-- almost got thrown out of a screening of it because I was yelling stupid shit at my friends during it and whatever.  But I always wanted to revisit since so it’s a touchstone for so many nerds -- it improved as an adult knowing what they were up to, at least, understanding better what they were trying to do, but I wouldn’t say that I was wrong as a kid either, not exactly... I’d put it down as “interesting” at the moment.  It’s helpful knowing the reason it looks like shit is they hired the cinematographer of Blade Runner, but then the producers made them fire that guy after only two or three scenes...

I think I’m missing some stuff on this list, but...

(Saw a few episodes of that Jack Ryan show with my family, too, since that’s their kind of thing, apropos of nothing-- it was not great!  Like, some guy’s in Vegas getting beat up because he wants pervy sex and then Jim From the Office frowns-- or I don’t know how to describe it, but ... not great).

Highlighter Videos:  I did a bunch.  I should do a separate video wrap-up for the year though, like people do.  That might be nice to have done.

Goals:

Three Scripts for the Project:  Technically I wrote way more than 3 but most of them got ripped up along the way.  But yeah, goal met.

Flowchart for Game: Still in progress on the flowchart-- kind of feeling inspired again to tackle all that, after Bandersnatch though.  The game within the game, not the show itself.  I love the fake games people imagine when they make shit like that, how vivid they always seem as compared to the real thing.  There’s a game that gets described in a Kelly Link short story that I think about more than I think about games I’ve spent 90000 hours on.

I didn’t do a favorite games of the year list, but this year was all about discovering the Yakuza series for me. And just... the way those games are all about excavating the same exact, relatively-understandable space, Kamarucho, year after year, game after game.  I think that’s really ... I don’t know what the right word to describe that is.  I just find that architectural obsessiveness really curious.  They’re curious games.  I could go on and on about them but instead, no.   

2019 Plan: My goal for this year was to create a good plan for 2019-- making a list of movies I want to watch, types of recipes to try, that kind of thing.  I think that’s what I’m going to do over the next couple days while I’m sick and have time off work.  

Finish Books:  I didn’t finish one!  Got too consumed by reading ... some comics I will never admit to having read.  Hoo-boy.  I have gone all the way down the rabbithole.

Cooking Class:  Nope.

Major Tidy:  Nope.  Smaller tidiness, yes, but I need to get rid of a lot of clutter.  But like I said, I think I’m going to have to move (and I’m thinking to a smaller place-- I think I have more space than I need right now) so that’s going to happen whether I like it or not.  

Finish Best-Of Assembly: I’ve been preparing a best-of this blog in case / when tumblr invariably goes down.  But in the course of that, a lot of things have to be slightly rewritten or edited down-- a lot of weird raving pared off things, so.  

Overall: There was more that probably I was too lazy to scribble down on the charts.  Things got lazy.  Things got derailed.  Things have to get put back on track. I’m not back at square one-- I feel good about having written as much as I have at least (even if I have a lot of work left before any of that’s... anything??).  But.  I’m glad a new year is coming-- it’s my favorite holiday; it’s the only holiday that promises anything really valuable.  A fresh start beats candy anyways, after you’re old enough to eat candy all the time because no one’s around to stop you.  A fresh start sounds nice...

#what gets measured gets managed

[afreakingdork]

Review Revisited: The Gentlemen's Alliance Cross

So after I posted my 2007 Manga Reviews I got to thinking about how those series formed my early manga opinions and how much I’ve grown as a person since reading them. In the spirit of that, I thought it would be a great idea to revisit those series of yore and update my reviews of them with my older, wiser perspective. 

The first up is the first that was on the list and a series that was closer to my heart than I remembered: Shinkuro (Shinshi Doumei Kurosu or The Gentlemen's Alliance Cross). Here’s the 2007 review as a refresher: 

ShinKuro: Or Gentlemen’s Alliance Cross for those that aren’t familar with it…Ok so I love this series and its awesome bottom line~ 1-3 are out currently, its one of those stories you gotta read over at least 4 times before you understand the plot, or maybe i have a focus problems who knows, all i know is you need to go out and read this, its got everything yo! Straight, yuri, yaoi…idk I’m not much of a gay fangirl, but hey ya gotta cover japanese basics~

Before I get into the veritable mountain of things I want to talk about (I mean, I have 14 years of feelings to sort through), I first want to tell a story of fate. When I decided to re-do these reviews, I went to look for my old manga. It’s not far, about 50 steps away to my bookshelf, but I didn’t see Shinkuro anywhere. Confused, I waited until the next time I visited my mom to look there and could not find it. I knew when I moved out of her house in 2017 I had sold some extra books to make the move easier, but couldn’t recall a specific memory of packing them up. I checked my email and the only clue was a listing on eBay, but there was no sold email attached. I’m usually really diligent with stuff like that, so I was totally stumped. Regardless, I had no manga, so I went ahead and started reading it on some pirating website. Now, I don’t condone these sites, but I couldn’t find the series anywhere else for whatever reason. I was only able to get a few chapters in before I just couldn’t take it anymore. The site I was using (one of the only sites to even have a pirated version. Seriously, why had this series totally disappeared from the US lexicon!?) only had a fan-scan of the series. Now, Shinkuro is something I’ve read many, many, many times and, while the fan-scan wasn’t unreadable, I kept getting really hung up on how different it was from what I remembered. I would read a line and my brain would make an error noise and respond with what the line should be. As I clicked through the pages, the errors piled up more and more and my brain was relentless about how the lines should have been translated. 

Frustrated, I totally gave up and the next time I saw my mom I told her of my plight. I could see the lightbulb go off over her head and she asked me if ‘that wasn’t the manga that didn’t sell on eBay and I gave to her to give away?’ I was taken aback; I hadn’t told her about the eBay email I found and instead only told her I couldn’t find the series I didn’t think I had gotten rid of. She said it was stored in a guest bedroom with a bunch of junk we were going to sell just before the pandemic struck last year. I was still incredulous, but she went back there with me to look for it. Now, no one knows my mom like I do, but I will tell you she is absolute garbage at describing stuff. She gave me this crazy description about a box that was the size of a loaf of bread and it had a hinge on it and I had no idea how that worked with cardboard. It took a long time, moving a metric shitton of full-to-the-brim boxes around to no avail. Since we were getting to the bottom of boxes that were stacked high, we were tag teaming the project where one person would lift and the other would rummage. It was at the bottom of a box in a 3-box stack that mom deemed the box incorrect by only shoving her hand inside. She said she felt a box, but it didn’t feel right so she moved on. I felt a pull and tilted my head so that I could see into the only sliver on the box, a tiny crack. I told her ‘I saw a box that looked kinda like a shoe box and is that what she meant by a hinge?’ She said she wasn’t sure, but we made quick work taking down the stack to reveal the smaller box. Upon closer inspection she said this had to be it and as I opened it there lay the entire 11 volume series. I tell you, I almost sobbed right there on the spot. What are the chances that I would try to sell the series, it wouldn’t sell (I listed all 11 volumes for 40$!!!), I would give it to mom to give away, she wouldn’t do so (she wasn’t sure what the age range for the books were), and then years later we would happen across it and mom would dismiss it while I pressed to check, to find these books. They were meant to stay with me is the only conclusion I can make and after re-reading the series I can say this is totally true, so let’s get into my renewed feelings: 

So, looking at my old review, I know exactly what my younger self meant by rereading the same bit 4 times to understand. Arina Tanemura has a penchant for putting 1000 screentones over every page and sometimes she swiftly moves through conversations and even locations between panels on the same page. It’s a breakneck speed to try to give every character of this ensemble class a time to shine. There’s also the hurdles of Tanemura’s style that can’t be ignored. When my partner saw the manga, he asked me if all the art really looked like that and I showed him that, yes indeed, and that was almost a pretty standard art style for shoujou manga from that time period. He was aghast and didn’t believe he could read something like that and I can totally see how that would be off-putting for the average reader (I’m not average in the sense that I’ve read it so many times I know all the ins and outs). For example, in middle school Haine cut her hair off and dyed it blond. She dyes it back when she goes to high school, but halfway through the series she cuts it and dyes it back to blond for Ushio’s sake. Tanemura doesn’t change ANY screentones during this time and you only find out that Haine dyes her her back ONCE AGAIN in a throw away line. I’ve held the pages up side-by-side and it’s totally indiscernible when Haine’s hair is blond vs. brown. 

That being said, one of the greatest parts of this series is how it was translated. There was so much love and care put into these Notes on the Text that it was the perfect series to start shaping my understanding of Japanese culture and writing. Instead of just a glossary saying what ‘-san’ meant as a suffix, these sections go so far as to explain why certain phrases were translated as they were and explain what the original Japanese text said and how it was a joke or a play on words. That is so rare to see in manga and I feel like it should be more standard. 

Now to face the elephant in the room head-on: let’s look into the LGBT+ themes in the series. 2007 Alex was quite afraid and prejudiced against queer culture. I can’t tell you where exactly it stemmed from because I don’t really remember feeling that way. I know it happened, I have evidence and my friends’ testimonies, but it doesn’t feel like I had that much hate in my heart. It’s systemic to our culture and that may be why, but regardless, I feel awful that I once felt that way. I was scared getting into this series that the LGBT+ themes would be handled so poorly as it often is in manga. Thankfully, that didn’t end up wholly being the case. In her author’s notes, Tanemura stated multiple times that she was not a fan of mlm or wlw content, but she wanted to use this series to push herself to do a lot of things she didn’t like otherwise. I want to put an excerpt on her final thoughts on those themes in the series here: 

I don’t know how the readers feel, but I’ve never been very fond of reading guy x guy and girl x girl relationships. But that was another reason for me to have done this series. I thought the series would have a nice twist to it if I tried to draw something I didn’t like. 

I regularly challenge myself to eat things I don’t like. I don’t like the idea of having dislikes, so it became an opportunity for me to get over that. 

And the result was... I still couldn’t get myself to be interested in it. So it’ll probably be a topic I’ll never write about again. But I think it was still worth it that I found that out. 

I won’t take the time to break down homophobia in Japanese society, but I find it interesting that Tanemura sees queer relationships not as a real thing in her stories, but instead as a commodity that she can compare to tastes in food. I found the story lines really compelling. Take Maora, for example. Tanemura refers to Maora as eccentric for cross dressing in her author notes, but in story Maora is actually characterized with a surprising amount of care on the subject. While some may view Maora as a ‘trap,’ I would instead posit that he’s genderfluid. Obviously he goes by he/him, but I think it’s so interesting that when told that boys couldn’t marry, Maora goes to great lengths to present as a female so Maguri and him could be together as they always wanted. When Maguri rejects this because he’s gay and prefers male presenting individuals, Maora holds on to his ‘femininity’ because it means something to him. All the work he put in is a representation of his love and later becomes something that he enjoys doing. There are, of course, a few pitfalls. I’m not a fan of the fact that when going to the Emperor’s Association meeting, Maora feels like he must dress more masculine because it’s a serious event (giving the connotation that dressing feminine is just a frivolous thing). I also really hate one of Maora’s final lines in the penultimate arc when the student council is breaking into Shuichiro’s house and he says “Don’t you blush! I’m a guy!” before kicking someone. I think Tanemura meant for that to be a cool one-liner, but instead it just undercuts who Maora is. 

On the flip side, I really like how Ushio’s love of Haine is characterized. While Ushio’s means of capturing Haine aren’t the best, I think her love is a beautiful arc. Ushio fell in love with a blond yanki that happened to break into her house to hide when she was at the lowest point in her life. When Haine has her night with Shizumasa and decides to ‘move back into the light,’ time stops for Ushio as Haine leaves her. Ushio is left looking for that person who saw her when everything else in her life was filled with hate. There is a beautiful story there where she realizes her love for Haine isn’t romantic or sexual love, but instead the powerful love in friendship. This story always holds the different types of love in high regard. It is stated multiple times that Takanari and Haine both hold their best friends in their hearts higher than their romantic partners and I adore that. It’s such a healthier way to represent relationships. Your romantic partners shouldn’t just supersede your other loves just because. 

The development of loves on the other hand can be a bit rocky. The bonus story between Kusame and Komaki is always one I held in such high regard because it’s characterization of changing love. Kusame, who’s been in love with Haine, starts dating her sister Komaki out of obligation and he ends up falling in love with her not because she’s similar to Haine, but instead because of how different she is and how those were things that he grew to appreciate and love about her instead. Can you say relationship goals?!  Contrasting that, you have the relationships between Itsuki Otomiya, Kazuhito Kamiya, and Maika Rikyuu. Maika and Itsuki were secretly dating in high school and Kazuhito sweeps in, steals the position of emperor from Itsuki by underhanded means and ensnares Maika in a marriage due to obligation for her family’s failing company. Over time, Maika grows to love Kazuhito and the whole thing always left a bad taste in my mouth. Maybe if the pages had been given a little more time it could have worked, there’s small signifiers, like how Kazuhito and Maika met and were friends before he pulled his repulsive plot. There was a precedent that the two got along and could have fallen in love, but instead it went full Stockholm and that is painted as ok. I do want to take a moment to say that scene where Itsuki returns from visiting Maika for the first time since all that happened where his current wife Ryouka stayed up because she was afraid he was going to leave her and he reassures her that he would have never done so was downright incredible. 

The timeline of Maika losing her memories confounds me as a way to keep her away from Haine. I know Kazuhito didn’t give her much choice in the matter, but she had a whole other child before she started to lose her memories and there is quite an age difference (like 7+ or so years) between Komaki and Tachibana, where Maika had her memories (for a few years?) and just made no effort to contact Haine in any way. It just seems overly cruel and unnecessary when Maika wrote a letter to Haine saying she would continue to write even though she couldn’t see her. I know a maid was watching her, but she couldn’t send a letter? She already sent one letter! Kazuhito’s goal was to give Haine back to Itsuki so she could live freely without the burden of his influence because he knows he’s an asshole that only cares about Maika and clipped her wings. He wants to atone for still keeping Maika trapped by letting Haine soar, but keeping Haine from at least talking to her mother through letters is just erroneous. That didn’t keep her free from him, it only made her miserable from not being able to talk to her mom. Ugh, just writing about it makes me so mad. 

It’s interesting to me that in her distaste for LGBT+ themes, Tanemura was about to have a polyamorous ending to the series. It’s disheartening that the only reason she didn’t do so was because she could only imagine there would be a power imbalance where Shizumasa would have been a pitiful party in such an arrangement. It’s not like I was rooting for a threesome (especially since two of them are twin brothers), but it’s an outdated view on what polyamorous relationships are actually like. Also, Takanari is the clear winner and I’m not sure why it’s ever a question for Haine. When you break it down, Haine really only spent one single night with Shizumasa while she actually had months and months of time built up with Takanari to build the foundation of a real relationship, but that’s neither here nor there. 

Overall, I’m so glad I re-read this series and I will never try to resell it ever again. It means so much to me and even though it’s CW levels of dramatic happenings (I can’t believe Toya pulled a gun on and shot Haine), there is a market for those things and they’re enjoyable in how bizarre they are. There’s obviously some failing to the story, but as a whole I still love it, even nostalgia aside. I think it’s a great series for those new to shoujou drama’s to read! 

Verdict: 

Read Right < Left 

#me #manga #manga review #review #The Gentlemen's Alliance Cross #Gentlemen's Alliance Cross #Shinshi Doumei Kurosu #shinkuro

[laurabwrites]

Going through the Ideas List

I think it is time to go through my list of story ideas again, discuss getting started on some of the prompts that'll turn into flash or short fiction and deleting the ones that have turned too cryptic or I won't get to for some other reason. If nothing else, on the personal level, explaining my organizational process will get me to reassess how it's working for me.

I have a paper and pencil notebook I write scenes freehand in, jot down quotes, and take notes on writing panels and videos on writing. Every so often (maybe twice a year), I'll go through the notebook(s) and copy any phrases or quotes that still spark story ideas into my to-do app (Wunderlist). In that app, in addition to my chores and day-to-day household stuff (very useful for reminding me to do stuff on an irregular schedule), I have lists for currently active projects, keeping up with this blog, things I want to look into for improving my writing, what I think of as administrativia, and finally, the relevant list: Story Ideas. 

There are 33 items on the list right now, one of which was added two days ago, while discussing a different piece I'd written with Partner. The list never ends... Or gets any shorter... At any rate, I'm thinking that I should break this list up into three lists and group the results in a folder labeled Story Ideas. The new lists would be flash/short stories, novellas, and novels, all based on how long I think the relevant idea would turn into, story-wise. I'll have to revisit that after I walk through the current list. 

The first item on the list is simply labeled 'Writing Prompts' and has the following sentences, phrases, snippets, and such saved as subtasks:

"Let's just get this out of the way," I said. "One of you idiots is likely to die."

Even astronauts get the blues: or why boredom drives us nuts.

How DO you break up with a demon?

"The tag line of the robot apocalypse is going to be 'From you okay? I learned it from watching you.'"

Your Third Wheel is Flat

Witches Brew

Aesthetic terrorist

"In my defense, the octopus started it."

The first one came from a blog post on Scalzi's website a few years back, as the first line of a project he was working on at the time. The second was a headline to a science article I saw on NPR at some point. The fourth one came from an episode of The Drunk & The Ugly (I don't even remember what they were talking about), and the seventh one comes from RPPR's Caleb describing Ross's taste in music, movies, books,... The last one I grabbed from Reddit's writingprompts subreddit the other day and ended up writing a story to on the commute home. Well, a first draft anyway. The rest, I honestly don't remember where they came from. 

Deciding to go through my list also got me to set up some Google documents and actually get started using these prompts. It's not like I'm going to magically have a story burst forth like Athena; I have to make the time to write them and setting up each with their own document eases the start-up cost for me. So yeah, in the week since I decided to write this post and made the documents, I've written a revenge fantasy piece for the first one that will almost certainly never see the light of day, a 635 word short for the second that I'm pleased with (needs a revision pass obviously, but they always do), am a third of the way into a story off the third prompt, and have a decent first draft off the eighth prompt.  

Look, the octopus started it, okay? 

In all seriousness though, I think I am going to delete the fifth and sixth ones as not meant to be. I'm not sure what I was thinking about when I wrote that the fifth one down anymore and it's not sparking any ideas now. Beyond a "is that word salad or something?" The sixth one is just too generic for me to want to save or work with right now. 

Please note that when I said first, I meant the first item that had been added, not the one at the top of the list. So if I mix up my terminology talking about the next (arbitrary) set of items, my apologies. But. This set is always a short two of three word encapsulation of the idea with notes attached to the item. The five oldest are:

Second contact

Summoned demon baby 

Time loop 

Superhero rape 

AI authors 

Second Contact stems off of a story I read as a teenager about first contact between humans and another species, not on one or the other's home-worlds, but because both had sent scientific exploration ships to the same astronomically interesting spot on space. And let me tell you, tracking down that title and author roughly 15 years later when all you remember is the plot was a bit rough (Murray Leinster's First Contact from 1945 btw). My idea is that the two species have worked out a general treaty to share science exploration ('cause money/resources) and discover a third species, this time at their home planet. I'll be honest, I haven't read a first contact story with multiple species as one side before, which is part of why I want to write it. The tracking down the citation for the original story is because I do want to reread the original before I start, to try to be faithful to the technology and characterizations Leinster did. A bit of homage to a story that stuck with me for more than a decade and a half. I think this one would tend towards a long shot story or short novella, to do the complexity of the issues involved justice.

The second idea came from a scene I had pop into my head, probably somehow related to Hellboy. Not that I know what prompted me to recall Hellboy. But the scene was some poor schmuck in military fatigues standing in the middle of a summoning circle comforting a crying demon baby, and then trying to gingerly hand the baby back to their parent. Who'd now been summoned into the same circle. The story idea and notes then came from trying to work backwards from that scene in order to make it plausible and an appropriate stinger/story ending. This one is definitely in the short story range, possibly flash fiction.

I'm torn about the third one. It originated out of an impulse to invert the 'magical black person' trope, but I'm not sure I have enough of a plot or characters to justify this impulse. It'd use the crazy amount of cop dramas I grew up watching as a story structure, but beyond having an older white lady as the mentor and a younger queer black guy as the two leads and the guy eventually raising the baby version of the lady (hence the time loop), I don't really have that spark of what the story is. So do I keep this one in the list and periodically pull it out to try and develop it or let it go? I'm not sure yet, so it survives for a while more.

I'm just going to copy out my notes for number four:

First trial for mental rape via chemically/psychically forcing someone to feel sexual desire at a gay conversion 'therapy' camp.

Yeah, this one came out of reading about the comic Jessica Jones and television show.  Short story length.

Number four came out of reading a review of a new science fiction book, I think, and after review,  is probably going away. To quote my notes again: 

AI emulation of the author's mind comes with every copy of a book/game/text – how does literary critique change

This is sounding more like a think piece essay than a story now, and I do not have a background in literary critique, either the theory or the practice. Also I'm not finding it that interesting anymore, to be honest. I'm pretty sure I read that book review back when I first started critiquing and getting critiqued on Scribophile, which is probably why the idea of how critique would change if you had access to the author's creative process was interesting.  

So, there's some of the oldest ideas I've kept around for writing projects one day. Next week I'll walk through the other 27 more quickly, and possibly include talking about that Tumblr draft section I've got too.

#organization #story ideas

[absoluteham]

Quarantine Diary, Day Three

I didn’t do much today, but I did a lot of fanfiction writing (mostly spread between multiple projects or potential projects, so it wasn’t actually as productive as it could have been), and then ended up back on AO3, rereading previous things I’ve posted.

I guess I’ve always assumed that other people did that, but I’ve never been brave enough to ask. Reading your own works seems a little like a faux pas at best, and narcissistic at worst, but it also seems kind of natural and obvious? Like, I mostly write the kinds of stories I like to read, so rereading my own stuff can be appealing.

It also gives me a chance to belatedly proofread. I’ve never worked with a real beta before, so all my stuff is self-edited. I think I do a pretty good job at the nuts-and-bolts spelling-and-grammar stuff, but occasionally a typo will slip through. But I do enforce a rule where I can’t meaningfully change content. It just doesn’t seem right. For all I know, someone loved this or that fic, or this or that chapter, and I don’t want to overwrite their favorite line because I decide five years later that a different paragraph would fit better.

I sometimes think of an article I read about a painter (I want to say Van Gogh, but honestly I can’t remember) who would repaint his older works over and over again, dozens of times each. I always wondered what it would be like if writers did that. If they wrote the same books or stories over and over again.

Would it be good? You could revisit an older work as a more experienced writer, and the work might benefit from your life experience and craft experience. A good idea with bad execution could be corrected. But at the same time, I feel like it could suffer, too. It could feel more formulaic, less organic, less passionate. Retreading the same water in different strokes, years after the inspiration had gone stale. And what if your readers preferred the first version? The second? The tenth? As an author, what would you do with that? Try to cobble together a Frankensteinian ULTIMATE version? Always consider the newest version to be the definitive one? Or the original?

I don’t have an answer. It’s just something I think about sometimes, especially when “Death of the Author” discourse comes up. If J K Rowling could write a version of Harry Potter with more consistent lore and better diversity... could she? Should she? Do you think it would be better? Or would it always feel like a gimmick? Like a reboot? Like it wasn’t the “real” version? (She’s just an example, I don’t actually want her to do this, understand.) It’s just a thought I have sometimes...

#ao3 #writing #musings